Support pip as installation method (over MSI and scripts)

[jeroenhabets]

For Python the standard way of installing packages is pip.

The pip installation works already but is not promoted nor supported. If it were we could just add a azure-cli line to our requirements.txt and it would automatically get installed and updated.

Additional context
Is there any reason (left) that requires alternative installation options like MSI on Windows and package managers on Linux?

[yungezz]

hi @jeroenhabets thanks for the feedback. Main concern of pip install is that cli dependencies mess up with users' python environment and existing installed packages, all those unexpected python packages dependencies version issues. That's why we recommend user install via package manager per OS

[leifericf]

I just want to add that being able to install azure-cli as a dependency via pip in the usual Pythonic way is required when azure-cli is used within another Python package. Here is a related issue.

Example

We have an internal Python package which uses azure-cli, which is currently broken (specifically, installation of the internal package fails due to a dependency conflict with azure-storage-blob).

My requirements.txt looks like this:

azure-cli==2.5.1
azure-identity==1.2.0
azure-keyvault-secrets==4.1.0
azureml-sdk==1.5.0
snowflake-connector-python[pandas]==2.2.8

Which results in this error:

ERROR: azure-cli 2.5.1 has requirement azure-storage-blob<2.0.0,>=1.3.1, but you'll have azure-storage-blob 12.3.2 which is incompatible.

Presumably due to incorrect dependency resolution between azureml-sdk and azure-cli.

Python version: 3.7.6

Operating system and processor architecture: Darwin-19.4.0-x86_64-i386-64bit