The best way to have people contributing to your project is to make easy for them to just checkout and run.

Virtualenv Bootstrap helps your contributor to just clone your repository and setup a development environmet with just one command:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone [your repo]
   

2. Bootstrap the development environment:

   python bootstrap
   

It works based on built-in Virtualenv capabilities, but it's completely isolated. Perfect even for newcommers who don't still have or understand Python Packaging tools.

Virtualenv Bootstrap detects your current python interpreter and:

1. Creates a Virtualenv for your project;
2. Installs Distribute;
3. Setups a simple postactivate file for those who use Virtualenvwrapper;
4. Searches for your requirements.txt at your repository root and install all your dependencies with Pip;

Just copy the bootstrap directory to you repository directory.

You can easely do this with the following script:

curl -L https://github.com/henriquebastos/virtualenv-bootstrap/tarball/master | tar -xzv --strip-components 1 */bootstrap

You might want to automate some other tasks to make the setup of complex projects really easy, like:

• runing tests
• detecting presence of services your project needs
• etc.

For that, just add your own commands to the function after_install on your bootstrap/hook.py.

Licensed under an MIT-style permissive license.

Bad Note: for now it only supports python 2.6 and 2.7