(It’s still possible to automate this on Windows, but it requires other dependencies and I leave it up to you to discover the details.) We could add a conditional check in our script to check for the type of OS and run a corresponding command to install git before we realize in horror that there’s no straightforward way to install git on Windows using a script on the default command prompt.

Our old setup script for Mac OS X no longer works. In more complicated projects, we have team members using different operating systems such as Linux and Windows. All our team members now have access to git as long as they run the setup script. In Mac OS X, we can add the command brew install git to our script.

One approach is to write a script to install the git CLI tool. In our example scenario, we want to replicate our working environment on a machine without git. Let’s take an example of one of the most common CLI tools we use in software development, git. Next, we have command line interface (CLI) tools dependencies as well. It can be a steep learning curve for a newcomer to the project and/or Python to understand these tools. Unfortunately, many of these tools have very similar names and some have identical purposes. Tools for managing Python dependencies include `pyenv`, `venv`, `virtualenv` and `pyvenv` (which is deprecated in favor of venv since Python 3.6). I’m sure these are common issues that other developers face as well, which explains the existence of numerous tools that solve the same problems.

Automating deployment was impossible given that the entire process of setting up was convoluted and manual.

Setting up projects on a new team member’s machine (which could have a different OS as well) being painful and time-consuming.

Losing track of the required libraries for a specific project.

Needing different versions of the same library for different projects.

These are common challenges that anyone would face in the real world: Often, I see people simply running pip install any library onto the local environment as a global dependency. People are often unsure of how to set up virtual environments or how to reproduce an environment. While we use Python as an example here, the concepts are equally applicable to any other programming language.Ī common pitfall that Python users fall into is dependency management.

This article covers the basics of using Docker to control dependencies ranging from operating system to packages.

Pip how to install curl in docker