We run a python/Tornado-based recommendations service behind the scenes at Wayfair.  As part of our code deployments, we need to install various third-party libraries to our Tornado servers. The python tools that do this kind of thing are a bit half-baked, so we paper over their inadequacies with puppet.

A while back a fellow name Richard Crowley wrote a puppet-pip provider, which seems to have been folded into Puppet 2.7, or replaced by a module in Puppet 2.7, or something like that. So in a sense his little project is dead. But Karthick on our team has resurrected a fork of it, a hybrid provider using subcommands of setuptools (easy_install) and pip for different aspects of installation, version checking and uninstallation. We call it easypip (easypip.rb), and the forked project containing it is now up on github.  Enjoy!