distman

Simple software distribution for production pipelines.

distman performs safe, versioned rollouts of software, scripts, and configuration files to filesystem locations. It is useful when deterministic deployments, environment-aware transforms, local caching, and quick rollback matter more than conventional package installation.

That includes revision-controlled configuration repositories. distman can publish configuration into runtime filesystem scopes without needing to understand the contents of those files. In that model, Git remains the source of truth, distman handles filesystem deployment, and runtime tools such as envstack can compose the deployed files later.

Deployed objects are stored as numbered versions, while an atomic symlink selects the active version:

bin/
├── tool -> versions/tool.2.a1b2c3d
└── versions/
    ├── tool.1.91c8a77
    └── tool.2.a1b2c3d

distman works well with envstack when you want filesystem deployment and runtime environment composition to remain separate concerns.

Installation

pip install -U distman

Install the optional JavaScript and HTML minifiers when a transform pipeline needs them:

pip install -U "distman[minify]"

Quickstart

For an ad hoc deployment, provide the source and destination directly:

dist --source path/to/tool --dest /deploy/bin/tool --dryrun
dist --source path/to/tool --dest /deploy/bin/tool --yes

Ad hoc deployments use the same versioned layout as configured deployments and match previous versions by content by default.

For repeatable project deployments, create a dist.json file at the root of a Git repository:

{
  "author": "pipeline@example.com",
  "targets": {
    "tools": {
      "source": "tools",
      "destination": "{DEPLOY_ROOT}/tools"
    }
  }
}

Preview and then perform the deployment:

dist --dryrun
dist --yes

Override a configured target source or destination from the CLI:

dist --source build/package --dest /deploy/lib/python/package --dryrun
dist --target tools --dest /deploy/tools --yes

The namespaced distman dist command provides the same distribution interface. Cache a shared deployment locally with:

distcache

Documentation

Full documentation is available in the docs folder:

• Getting Started
• Distribution Configuration
• CLI Reference
• Transform Pipelines
• Local Caching

The documentation is also published through the repository's GitHub Pages workflow.

License

distman is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License.