Striker is a deployment package builder, capable of building packages in several different formats, running basic tests on those packages, and distributing them. It is a tool for managing the build and release lifecycle.

Packaging

Why another packaging tool? After all, the Python world already has eggs and wheels, and they work really well, right? Well, yes and no. A wheel (or the older egg) contains a single package and information about its dependencies. Installing a full project onto a system requires that several wheels be downloaded and installed, and we often have dependencies on the exact versions that are used--i.e., which exact versions have we performed acceptance tests against? Also, when you're talking about installing a package across several thousand machines, just downloading all those dependencies represents an enormous network load.

Striker is intended to help with this problem. The packages it builds include all of the dependencies into a single artifact, which can then be distributed to those several thousand systems in a much more scalable fashion, such as a peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent.