scbedd / drainpipe

A probably quickly-broken pip internals extension. Grabs downloaded whls and sdists in a usable format before they're siphoned off.

drainpipe

Drainpipe is an unstable solution to a dumb problem.

Huge caveat. This method only works on a version of pip installed off of pypi. The bundled pip.exe cannot be patched in-place.

pip doesn't have a great way to actually dump the data that its downloaded. Yes, you can run pip cache and get a couple wheels, but in my experience you get incomplete results back.

/> python ./drainpipe.py drain

Simple call to modify your pip install, updating the original download functionality to also syphon the downloaded bits off to a folder.

/> python ./drainpipe.py plug

to restore normal pip operations. Or, just, you know, clean up your venv.

The strategy

We pick a single function to patch in place.

• pip._internal.operations.prepare.unpack_url

There is no pip extension methodology that I'm aware of. So the only option is to nuke the site from orbit with the manual file patch.