# Installing local dependencies into a Tesseract

**URL:** <https://si-tesseract.discourse.group/t/installing-local-dependencies-into-a-tesseract/50>\
**Category:** Showcase\
**Tags:** v0-7-x\
**Created:** [February 26, 2025, 2:36pm UTC](https://si-tesseract.discourse.group/t/installing-local-dependencies-into-a-tesseract/50 "2025-02-26T14:36:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Alessandro](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex009/user_avatar/si-tesseract.discourse.group/alessandro/32/37_2.png) [@Alessandro](https://si-tesseract.discourse.group/u/Alessandro)\
**Post date:** [February 26, 2025, 2:36pm UTC](https://si-tesseract.discourse.group/t/installing-local-dependencies-into-a-tesseract/50/1 "2025-02-26T14:36:27Z")

</div>

# Installing local dependencies into a Tesseract

## Context

Sometimes it might be necessary to bundle local dependencies into a Tesseract;  
this can be done by simply adding their path to the `tesseract_requirements.txt` file.  
Both absolute and relative paths work, but in case they are relative paths, they should be  
relative to the Tesseract’s root folder (i.e., the one which contains the `tesseract_api.py` file)

## Example Tesseract

Here’s an example: let’s initialize an empty tesseract via

```bash
$ tesseract init --name cowsay
 [i] Initializing Tesseract cowsay in directory: .
 [i] Writing template tesseract_api.py to tesseract_api.py
 [i] Writing template tesseract_config.yaml to tesseract_config.yaml
 [i] Writing template tesseract_requirements.txt to tesseract_requirements.txt

```

And let’s then edit the `tesseract_api.py` file to read

```python
import cowsay
from pydantic import BaseModel

class InputSchema(BaseModel):
   message: str = "Hello, Tesseractor!"

class OutputSchema(BaseModel):
   out: str

def apply(inputs: InputSchema) -> OutputSchema:
   return OutputSchema(out=cowsay.get_output_string("cow", inputs.message))

```

This Tesseract will accept a message like “Hello, world!” as an input and return

```raw
 _______________
< Hello, World! >
 ---------------
        \ ^__^
         \ (oo)\ _______
            (__)\ )\/\
                ||----w |
                || ||

```

but in order to do so, it will need the dependency `cowsay` installed. We could just  
add `cowsay` to the `tesseract_requirements.txt` file, but that would install it from PyPI every  
time. Let’s instead download it via pip download and then bundle it into a Tesseract; in order to  
do the former, we can run:

```bash
$ pip download cowsay==6.1
Collecting cowsay==6.1
  Obtaining dependency information for cowsay==6.1 from https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/f1/13/63c0a02c44024ee16f664e0b36eefeb22d54e93531630bd99e237986f534/cowsay-6.1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata
  Downloading cowsay-6.1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (5.6 kB)
Downloading cowsay-6.1-py3-none-any.whl (25 kB)
Saved ./cowsay-6.1-py3-none-any.whl
Successfully downloaded cowsay

```

We can then specify it as a local dependency in `tesseract_requirements.txt` by adding the following line:

```auto
./cowsay-6.1-py3-none-any.whl

```

Finally, let’s build the Tesseract, and verify it works

```bash
$ tesseract build .
 [i] Building image ...
 [i] Built image sha256:7d024, ['cowsay:latest']

$ tesseract run install_tarball apply '{"inputs": {"message": "Hello, World!"}}'
{"out":" _____________\n| Hello, World! |\n =============\n \\\n \\\n ^__ ^\n (oo)\\_______\n (__)\\ )\\/\\\n ||----w |\n || ||"}

```