How to handle python packages with conflicting names?

I'm using two python packages that have the same name.

Is there a canonical or pythonic way to handle installing two packages with conflicting names? So far, I've only occasionally needed one of the packages during development/building, so I've been using a separate virtualenv to deal with the conflict, but it makes the build step more complex and I wonder if there isn't a better way to handle it.

Solution

You could use the --target option for pip and install to an alternate location:

pip install --target=/tmp/test/lib/python3.6/site-packages/alt_alembic alembic

Then when you import in python, do the first as usual and for the alt do an import from that namespace like this:

import alembic  # alembic.io version
from alt_alembic import alembic as alt_alembic  # pip version

Then when you're making calls to that one you can call alt_alembic.function() and to the one that isn't in PyPi, alembic.function() My target path has /tmp/test as I was using a virtual env. You would need to replace that path with the correct one for your python installation.