Creating an external package

It is possible to create external ClowdFlows packages which can be installed with pip and included into ClowdFlows.

This allows us to have separate repositories for different packages. As time will progress I will move most of the packages to external packages so that we will keep only the bare minimum in the main ClowdFlows repository.

Here is an example of an external package:

https://github.com/anzev/rdm

The Python package is called rdm and features two ClowdFlows packages:

rdm.db
rdm.wrappers

Each of these packages is pretty much the same as all the internal ClowdFlows packages in the workflows folder.

In order to import these packages you must do the following:

• add ‘rdm.db’ and ‘rdm.wrappers’ to your INSTALLED_APPS_EXTERNAL_PACKAGES setting (an example is shown in __local_settings.py)
  • Do one of the following:
    • import each package separately
      • python manage.py import_package rdm.db
      • python manage.py import_package rdm.wrappers
    • import all packages (which will also import external packages)
      • python manage.py import_all

Exporting the package after making changes to the database

If I have an external package entitled ‘extpackage’ in the following directory:

/home/janez/extpackage/

and I wish to commit some changes that I have made to the abstract widget database:

I export the package like this:

python manage.py export_package extpackage /home/janez/extpackage/

this will export the package to /home/janez/extpackage/package_data. I can safely commit and push this to the repository of the external package.