I recently had to pack a project with Reprozip where all the dependencies can be nicely preserved. Reprozip uses ptrace and thus only works on Linux, which means I had to set up a linux environment on my Mac. I mean, you can’t call yourself a software engineer without having a Linux (virtual) machine, can you?! 😓

In case someone out there are faced with the same task, I’ve documented my setup process in this post.

My Environment

macOS Catalina 10.15.1

Install Reprozip

Install VirtualBox Or Equivalent

Vagrant needs VirtualBox to run.

Download installer here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

If the installer failed, you may need to enable its kernel extension in: System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General

Install Vagrant Or Equivalent

Download the installer for MacOS from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html.

Click, install, done.

Then create Vagrantfile:

$ vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64

Set up VM:

$ vagrant up

After running the above two commands, you will have a fully running virtual machine in VirtualBox running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit.

ssh into VM

$ vagrant ssh

Set up virtualenv

IMPORTANT: make sure to run an update on the package index in the VM before procedding:

$ sudo apt update

install virtualenv with pip

$ sudo apt install virtualenv

check if installation was successful:

$ virtualenv --version

create an env

$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python <name>

activate an env

$ source DBenv/bin/activate

Install Pre-reqs For Reprozip

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo apt-get install sqlite3
$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

Finally, Install Reprozip

$ pip install reprozip
$ pip install reprounzip

Run Reprozip

Bring The Executable Into The Environment For Packaging

In order to use scp, we need to install a plugin:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-scp

Note that this goes from local to linux:

$ vagrant scp <local_path> [vm_name]:<remote_path>

More about how scp in/out of a Vagrant VM: https://github.com/invernizzi/vagrant-scp.

In case you didn’t know your [vm_name] just like myself, here’s how you track it down:

$ vagrant status

Run Trace and Pack

We’ll first trace all the system calls in execution by using Reprozip trace command:

$ reprozip trace <command>

$ reprozip pack <pack-name>

It gives an .rpz file which can then be scped to other system environments and be unzipped and ran.

Terminate a VM

when you are done playing around, you can terminate the virtual machine with:

$ vagrant destroy