I was under the impression that Django projects couldn't be deployed when they were bdists (because Django doesn't use pkg_resources).
I agree the annoyance wrt needing the same environment as the target. We tend to have two platforms that are supported: CentOS 5.x and MacOS. Keeping the build machine on the same platform as the deployment machines is simple. Creating the eggs for MacOS developers is more difficult, but still not too bad. That might seem odd, since we could just use pypi.python.org, but we have an internal PyPi server so that we can easily share internal libraries. Adding a line to a project's setup.cfg makes this trivial for the application developers.
There's another annoyance with sdists. I don't want to compile during deployments. So, I build everything that can possibly be built as an egg as one, and fall back to sdist for everything else. I push those to the internal PyPi server. At deploy time, I create a virtualenv and easy_install the appropriate artifacts. I know the correct artifacts because I `pip freeze` the requirements at build time.
We're also extra paranoid, so our stage and production VPCs are on different AWS accounts. We have one PyPi server per VPC and flow artifacts forward as needed.
I agree the annoyance wrt needing the same environment as the target. We tend to have two platforms that are supported: CentOS 5.x and MacOS. Keeping the build machine on the same platform as the deployment machines is simple. Creating the eggs for MacOS developers is more difficult, but still not too bad. That might seem odd, since we could just use pypi.python.org, but we have an internal PyPi server so that we can easily share internal libraries. Adding a line to a project's setup.cfg makes this trivial for the application developers.
There's another annoyance with sdists. I don't want to compile during deployments. So, I build everything that can possibly be built as an egg as one, and fall back to sdist for everything else. I push those to the internal PyPi server. At deploy time, I create a virtualenv and easy_install the appropriate artifacts. I know the correct artifacts because I `pip freeze` the requirements at build time.
We're also extra paranoid, so our stage and production VPCs are on different AWS accounts. We have one PyPi server per VPC and flow artifacts forward as needed.