Simon Willison’s Weblog

Compile everything with a one-liner

1st July 2004

The other day, we noticed that the .py files in our main mod_python application at work did not have corresponding compiled .pyc files. mod_python runs as the unprivileged apache user, which on our server doesn’t have the required permissions to write the compiled .pyc files in to the directories in which our code lives.

A bit of digging came up with the compileall module, which provides functions for byte-compiling Python files in bulk. We invoked it using the following shell one-liner, executed at the upper most directory of our code tree:

python2.3 -c "import compileall; compileall.compile_dir('.')"

Executed as root, the result was a full set of .pyc bytecode files.