How to customize a requirements.txt for multiple environments?

Question

I have two branches, Development and Production. Each has dependencies, some of which are different. Development points to dependencies that are themselves in development. Likewise for Production. I need to deploy to Heroku which expects each branch's dependencies in a single file called 'requirements.txt'.

What is the best way to organize?

What I've thought of:

• Maintain separate requirements files, one in each branch (must survive frequent merges!)
• Tell Heroku which requirements file I want to use (environment variable?)
• Write deploy scripts (create temp branch, modify requirements file, commit, deploy, delete temp branch)

Answer 1

You can cascade your requirements files and use the "-r" flag to tell pip to include the contents of one file inside another. You can break out your requirements into a modular folder hierarchy like this:

`-- django_project_root
|-- requirements
|   |-- common.txt
|   |-- dev.txt
|   `-- prod.txt
`-- requirements.txt

The files' contents would look like this:

common.txt:

# Contains requirements common to all environments
req1==1.0
req2==1.0
req3==1.0
...

dev.txt:

# Specifies only dev-specific requirements
# But imports the common ones too
-r common.txt
dev_req==1.0
...

prod.txt:

# Same for prod...
-r common.txt
prod_req==1.0
...

Outside of Heroku, you can now setup environments like this:

pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

or

pip install -r requirements/prod.txt

Since Heroku looks specifically for "requirements.txt" at the project root, it should just mirror prod, like this:

requirements.txt:

# Mirrors prod
-r requirements/prod.txt