Where is that egg?

published 2009-02-04 14:56:00

In the Zope/Plone world working with zc.buildout is the norm nowadays. Many people use an egg cache for speed and disk space preservation. That way eggs aren't stored directly in your buildout anymore and it can by cumbersome to get there location from the commandline. One way to solve this is collective.recipe.omelette but that only exposes the paths for all eggs at once. I wrote a small shell function to solve that issue.

function eggpath() {
        local name=$1;
        shift;
        local files=$*;
        if [ -z $files ]; then
                if [ -e ./bin/instance* ]; then
                        local files="$files ./bin/instance*";
                fi
                if [ -e ./bin/client* ]; then
                        local files="$files ./bin/client*";
                fi
        fi
        grep -o -iE "/.*$name.*.egg" $files | sort -u;
}

With this you can get the path of an egg from any script. First argument is a regexp which is used for matching the name, most of the time this is a simple string with a part of the egg name. Optionally you can provide the name of the script(s) which should be checked, if it's not given the function will look for bin/instance* or bin/client* scripts by default, which are the most common names for the Zope scripts in Plone buildouts.

My most common use case for this is for opening the egg with my editor like this: mate `eggpath some.egg`.

I hope this is useful for other people as well.