Sharing Projects

Index of All Documentation » Wing Pro Reference Manual » Project Manager »


By default Wing Pro stores each project in two similarly named files:

  • The *.wpr file contains the sharable data for the project, which can be checked into revision control, used on other machines, and shared with other users.
  • The *.wpu file contains user and machine-specific data.

Project Type, under the Options tab of Project Properties can be set to Single User (One File) in order to store both branches of the project into a single *.wpr file. This is rarely necessary, except when moving a project to or from Wing Personal, which can only read single-user projects.

Making Project Files More Sharable

In most cases sharing the *.wpr file will just work. File paths are stored in a platform-independent way, and relative to the project's location on disk, so they will work on different hosts and OSes.

If revision control conflicts arise among different users of a .wpr file, environment variables can be used in any conflicting Project Properties to make the shared project file uniform for all users and on all machines. Environment can be inherited from outside of Wing or set using Environment in Project Properties. The values for the Environment property are stored in the .wpu file and thus may vary by user.

Changing Which Properties are Shared

Another way to make a project more sharable is to alter which properties are stored in the shared *.wpr file. This is done by editing the .wpr file with a text editor and setting the proj.shared-attribute-names property. This is a list of properties to add or remove from the default set of shared properties. Each item in the list is an property name preceded by - to move a shared property to the non-shared *.wpu file, or + to move a non-shared property to the shared *.wpr file. This specification is applied to the default set of shared properties in order to determine which properties to share in this project.

The following example would move the commands defined in the OS Commands tool into the user-specific *.wpu file and would share the Python Executable and Python Path defined in Project Properties in the *.wpr file:

proj.shared-attribute-names = [
  '-console.toolbox',
  '+proj.pyexec',
  '+proj.pypath',
]

Note that sharing the Python Executable and Python Path works only if the values are valid and uniform on all the machines where the project is used. This can be easier to achieve if the values use environment variable references such as ${WING:PROJECT_DIR}/a/b/c for a path entry.

The default set of shared properties is:

proj.shared-attribute-names
proj.directory-list
proj.file-list
proj.file-type
proj.main-file
proj.home-dir
testing.test-file-list
testing.auto-test-file-specs
testing.test-framework
proj.debug-sub-processes
debug.named-entry-points
proj.launch-config
debug.launch-configs
console.toolbox

The names of other potentially sharable properties can be found in the .wpu file.

File Format

The .wpr and .wpu project files use the same textual file format that is used Wing's preferences file. See Preferences File Format for details.

Note that only non-empty and non-default values are stored in the project file. For example, proj.file-list will be missing if no files are individually added to the project.