Mad With Power, or just keeping it on the down-low... There's a few good reasons to want to create or use a custom bundle of libraries for circuitpython!

Perhaps you write educational guides and lesson plans and want to have all your custom requirements in once easy to use place. Maybe you've got enough private, rudely-named, or trademark-infringing libraries / drivers / helpers for CircuitPython that you won't add to the community bundle, but still want the convenience of circup (the package manager for CircuitPython).

I love having a package manager for circuitpython (currently supports USB mass storage based devices, but theres a pull-request for web-workflow suppport).
circup install --auto --py and I get all my dependencies in readable form, modifiable even if I so wish!

So a recent pull request caught my attention, for circup-depenencies that weren't in the pypi repository (python package hosting used by `pip`) yet or at all. That's the exact state of my libraries!

I also was aware of seeing a bundle-add option for circup, used to add custom library bundles, so this weekend was time to bring it all together.

Minor Yak Shaving - Get Library Ready

I've cleaned up the library enough to have a releasable thing, but never sorted the docs. The project is a fork of a Sensirion python library, for which I actually have permission to use their name, but to avoid any issues I wanted to have a way without friction, like a custom library bundle. Anyway the docs use Sphinx, and the read-the-docs theme, but are an old form of config etc, so I cleaned up that to the point of publishing to github pages.

Then I could setup a pyproject.toml file with a [circup] section, and inside a field called circup_dependencies with an array of strings. Similar to this:

After looking at the current community bundle (which has a build script, and publishes json+zips with each release) I noticed the dependencies were only setup for a requirements.txt and not the new pyproject.toml circup_dependencies section. The build script did however include the requirements.txt and pyproject.toml for each included library in the built release assets (a zip for each mpy/circuitpython version plus a python file version).

As a result of this I've included fake requirements in my requirements.txt (they will actually pass and install with python on a pc as the names match the official libraries. Then the two circuitpython dependencies are included in pyproject.toml as described above.

The last thing was that there were two libraries for release, the Sensirion SEN5x device driver, and a base Sensirion I2C python driver. Both of these need to be submoduled into my bundle repo, in a similar fashion to the official community bundle repo.

Create the bundle

Simplest for me was to fork the community bundle, then clone it locally and git submodule deinit --all -f and delete all the submodules, then add the two of my own, and tweak the readme. I also stopped the CI script from attempting to publish to AWS S3. It's worth noting it will error if the submodules commit reference doesn't match latest tag.

The usual git submodule add, for each library to be included, and if you update things in the driver repos then craft a new release for them and then come back to the bundle repo and enter the library submodule folder and git pull then commit and push those changes, then create a new release of the bundle. Probably equally wise to use the update script or tweak the CI script to update and release (could be scheduled).

Use the Bundle

circup bundle-add <github_owner>/<github_repository_name>

e.g. for https://github.com/good-enough-technology/CircuitPython_GoodEnough_Bundle

circup bundle-add good-enough-technology/circuitpython_goodenough_bundle

then install newly available package:

circup install sensirion_i2c_sen5x

(I prefer to add the --py option to get readable python instead of .mpy module files)