How do I copy a python function to a remote machine and then execute it?
- by Hugh
I'm trying to create a construct in Python 3 that will allow me to easily execute a function on a remote machine.
Assuming I've already got a python tcp server that will run the functions it receives, running on the remote server, I'm currently looking at using a decorator like
@execute_on(address, port)
This would create the necessary context required to execute the function it is decorating and then send the function and context to the tcp server on the remote machine, which then executes it. Firstly, is this somewhat sane? And if not could you recommend a better approach? I've done some googling but haven't found anything that meets these needs.
I've got a quick and dirty implementation for the tcp server and client so fairly sure that'll work. I can get a string representation the function (e.g. func) being passed to the decorator by
import inspect
string = inspect.getsource(func)
which can then be sent to the server where it can be executed. The problem is, how do I get all of the context information that the function requires to execute? For example, if func is defined as follows,
import MyModule
def func():
result = MyModule.my_func()
MyModule will need to be available to func either in the global context or funcs local context on the remote server. In this case that's relatively trivial but it can get so much more complicated depending on when and how import statements are used. Is there an easy and elegant way to do this in Python? The best I've come up with at the moment is using the ast library to pull out all import statements, using the inspect module to get string representations of those modules and then reconstructing the entire context on the remote server. Not particularly elegant and I can see lots of room for error.
Thanks for your time
