How I accidentally deleted all my Python modules and got it back in 20 minutes

Today I was careless and it made me some trouble. I was working on a Flask web app and wasn’t using virtualenv due to my laziness. I just wanted a prototype up-and-running ASAP on Heroku. In order to deploy your app to Heroku you have to put a requirements.txt in the app’s directory. Without a virtualenv pip freeze > requirements.txt doesn’t work because it puts all globally installed modules into it. After 40 seconds of searching for solutions in Google I found which claimed to help me out. After downloading it I took a quick look at the README for usage info but I wasn’t just that time, I was as well because it clearly stated that pip-tools careless stupid “Now that you have a requirements.txt, you can use pip-sync to update your virtual env to reflect exactly what’s in there. Note: this will install/upgrade/uninstall everything necessary to match the requirements.txt contents.” I didn’t pay enough attention and ran pip-sync. And because the lack of virtualenv it synced my requirements.txt (with only 3 packages in it) with my globally installed Python modules. Yes, . All I had was this log in my terminal: it uninstalled everything I felt angry about my mistake but I needed a solution. After a bunch of Google search I found out that no one have ever been that dumb to delete all their Python modules accidentally so I had to come up with something by myself and here is what I did: copied the log from my terminal and pasted it in a python script as a multi line string used vim search and replace to remove all the redundant info from the log split the newly created string(with only the module names) wrote a for loop over the list and ran the following line: subprocess.call(‘sudo pip install %s’ % package_name, shell True) It almost worked! The only problem was pip needed some packages preinstalled like , and . After installing those from my distro’s repository my scripted worked as expected and installed back everything. appdirs packaging pyparsing The moral of the story: don’t be stupid (always use virtualenv) if you are stupid maybe you can compensate it with a clever idea is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories