EN | Console on Windows without Admin rights

I am working in the corporate environment. And based on the fact that I am not in the corporation structure set in the boxes of developers, I have quite limited access to the functionality of my Windows notebook even though I work in IT. Highly limited access. I cannot even run commands from the command line. To be fair, though, this is quite common practice, which saves time to my fellow IT colleagues when something gets broken. On the other hand it highly limits me, when some tasks can be done quickly using commands from the command line.

How is this related to Django?

Believe me or not, it is much faster (read less stressful) for me to setup a small running intra-web application in 2 hours than asking several committees to approve the project to actually build the same. So I love Django and Python for these quick, dirty, and as I stress to everyone, temporary solutions. And believe me, as I am from IT department, when I say temporary, it really gets wiped out at the set date.

When managing Django one needs to run commands from the command line quite often. Therefore having command line access is pretty useful.

So the mission was: set the USB portable command line tools for a Django development, where no Admin rights and no installation is needed.

This is the shopping list:

[] Portable Python
[] Pyreadline
[] IPython
[] Console2

For the Portable Python - download the .zip file from http://www.portablepython.com/site/download/

It is currently in Beta 1.0 having Python 2.5 with some other stuff already added.

We will work in the root of separate drive (L:), but you should be able to set everything anywhere.

We put all development tools into the directory \devtools\

Unzip the PortablePython1.0.zip into the devtools and rename the final dir PortablePython1.0 to python.

Test the python "installation" by running python (not the pythonw). You should get something like this:

Shopping list so far:

[x] Portable Python
[] Pyreadline
[] IPython
[] Console2

IPython is little bit trickier. For the tab completion, coloring and some other nice stuff it needs pyreadline when running on Windows. Just download the .exe installer from http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/pyreadline-1.3.win32.exe

If you do not want to populate registry, unzip the installer .exe and copy the content of the PURELIB directory into L:\devtools\python\Lib\site-packages

You can test the "installation" by running python and executing

> import pyreadline

It should not give you any error.

Shopping list so far:

[x] Portable Python
[x] Pyreadline
[] IPython
[] Console2

Now IPython can be downloaded from http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/ipython-0.7.2.win32.exe and again just unzip the .exe into some temporary folder. From there I just copied the content of PURELIB into into L:\devtools\python\Lib\site-packages and whole folder SCRIPTS moved into L:\devtools\python

You can test the "installation" by running python and executing

import IPython
IPython.Shell.start().mainloop()

Shopping list so far:

[x] Portable Python
[x] Pyreadline
[x] IPython
[] Console2

Basically it is possible to run commands since the IPython is installed, but I wanted to have nice Terminal window. This can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

I took the latest Console-2.00b129-Beta.zip and unziped into the content into L:\devtools

Now when you run the Console and have some corporate restrictions you get similar error to the following one

Put following configuration into the Settings / Console / Shell

\devtools\python\python.exe \devtools\python\SCRIPTS\ipython

and some high number (eg. 800) to the Settings / Console / Buffer size / Rows in order to get scrollable window. When you run Console now you should get something like this

IPython is working now directly from the "command window", which means you can execute any Python commands and some system commands with history and TAB completion.
System commands have to start with exclamation mark

The window can be exited with CTRL-D.