I prefer my system for running youtube-dl in an isolated environment without having to install all of its dependencies on the host. Ansible writes a bash script at ~/bin/youtube-dl containing:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  set -e

  IMAGE_NAME="grepular/youtube-dl"

  # Build the image if it does not exist
  if [[ $(podman images --filter "reference=$IMAGE_NAME" -q) == "" ]]; then
      podman build -t "$IMAGE_NAME" -<<EOF >&2
  FROM python:3-slim
  RUN python3 -m pip --no-cache-dir install youtube_dl
  ENTRYPOINT ["youtube-dl"]
  EOF
  fi

  podman run --net host -i --rm -v "$PWD:/app" -w /app "$IMAGE_NAME" "$@"

Pipx is pretty much that - installs a package into its own venv and links script entry points to .local/bin

QQ, aren't the created files owned by root?

Nope. I'm using podman rather than docker so they're owned by the user that runs the script. The root user isn't involved. If I were using docker, I'd add `-u "$(id -u):$(id -g)"` to the docker args to deal with that issue.

I’ve been doing a manual version of this for years, creating a shell shim wrapping a venv for cli tools. This is much neater, thanks!