Python setuptools: How can I list a private repository under install_requires?

I was trying to get this to work for installing with pip, but the above was not working for me. From [1] I understood the PEP508 standard should be used, from [2] I retrieved an example which actually does work (at least for my case).

Please note; this is with pip 20.0.2 on Python 3.7.4

setup(
    name='<package>',
...
    install_requires=[
        '<normal_dependency>',
         # Private repository
        '<dependency_name> @ git+ssh://[email protected]/<user>/<repo_name>@<branch>',
         # Public repository
        '<dependency_name> @ git+https://github.com/<user>/<repo_name>@<branch>',
    ],
)

After specifying my package this way installation works fine (also with -e settings and without the need to specify --process-dependency-links).

References [1] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4187 [2] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5566

Here's what worked for me:

  install_requires=[
      'private_package_name==1.1',
  ],
  dependency_links=[
      'git+ssh://[email protected]/username/private_repo.git#egg=private_package_name-1.1',
  ]

Note that you have to have the version number in the egg name, otherwise it will say it can't find the package.

I couldn't find any good documentation on this, but came across the solution mainly through trial & error. Further, installing from pip & setuptools have some subtle differences; but this way should work for both.

GitHub don't (currently, as of August 2016) offer an easy way to get the zip / tarball of private repos. So you need to point setuptools to tell setuptools that you're pointing to a git repo:

from setuptools import setup
import os
# get deploy key from https://help.github.com/articles/git-automation-with-oauth-tokens/
github_token = os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN']

setup(
    # ...
    install_requires='package',
    dependency_links = [
    'git+https://{github_token}@github.com/user/{package}.git/@{version}#egg={package}-0'
        .format(github_token=github_token, package=package, version=master)
        ] 

A couple of notes here:

• For private repos, you need to authenticate with GitHub; the simplest way I found is to create an oauth token, drop that into your environment, and then include it with the URL
• You need to include some version number (here is 0) at the end of the link, even if there's no package on PyPI. This has to be a actual number, not a word.
• You need to preface with git+ to tell setuptools it's to clone the repo, rather than pointing at a zip / tarball
• version can be a branch, a tag, or a commit hash
• You need to supply --process-dependency-links if installing from pip

I found a (hacky) workaround:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from setuptools import setup
import os

os.system('pip install git+https://github-private.corp.com/user/repo.git@master')

setup( name='original-name'
     , ...
     , install_requires=['repo'] )

I understand that there are ethical issues with having a system call in a setup script, but I can't think of another way to do this.