earthaccess-lite or earthaccess-auth sub-package?

[maxrjones]

I'd like a way to get auto-refreshed short-lived tokens to use as bearer tokens for HTTPS requests, but don't really want to pull in all of earthaccess' dependencies. This might be too radical of an idea, but I'm wondering if you've considered an earthaccess-lite or earthaccess-auth sub-package that includes only the earthdata authentication components?

Dependency Analysis

I asked Claude to write a script to compare the full earthaccess install against a minimal auth-only install (just requests, tinynetrc, and tenacity). The results are significant:

Metric	Full Install	Auth-Only	Savings
Packages	32	7	25 fewer (78%)
Disk Size	38 MB	2.0 MB	36 MB (94.6%)

The auth-only install avoids heavyweight dependencies like s3fs, aiobotocore/botocore (AWS SDK), the async ecosystem (aiohttp, etc.), python-cmr, and pqdm/tqdm.

View comparison script

#!/bin/bash
set -e

# Colors for output
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
BLUE='\033[0;34m'
YELLOW='\033[1;33m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color

echo -e "${BLUE}========================================${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}earthaccess Dependency Size Comparison${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}========================================${NC}"
echo ""

WORKDIR=$(mktemp -d)
echo -e "${YELLOW}Working directory: $WORKDIR${NC}"
echo ""

# --- Full earthaccess install ---
echo -e "${GREEN}[1/4] Creating full earthaccess environment...${NC}"
FULL_ENV="$WORKDIR/full-env"
uv venv "$FULL_ENV" --quiet
uv pip install earthaccess --quiet --python "$FULL_ENV/bin/python"

# --- Minimal auth-only install ---
echo -e "${GREEN}[2/4] Creating minimal auth-only environment...${NC}"
MINIMAL_ENV="$WORKDIR/minimal-env"
uv venv "$MINIMAL_ENV" --quiet
uv pip install requests tinynetrc tenacity --quiet --python "$MINIMAL_ENV/bin/python"

# --- Collect metrics ---
echo -e "${GREEN}[3/4] Analyzing environments...${NC}"
echo ""

# Function to get env stats
get_env_stats() {
    local env_path=$1
    local site_packages="$env_path/lib/python3.*/site-packages"
    
    # Expand glob
    site_packages=$(echo $site_packages)
    
    # Count packages (directories with .dist-info)
    local pkg_count=$(ls -d "$site_packages"/*.dist-info 2>/dev/null | wc -l)
    
    # Get total size
    local total_size=$(du -sh "$site_packages" 2>/dev/null | cut -f1)
    local total_bytes=$(du -sb "$site_packages" 2>/dev/null | cut -f1)
    
    echo "$pkg_count|$total_size|$total_bytes"
}

FULL_STATS=$(get_env_stats "$FULL_ENV")
MINIMAL_STATS=$(get_env_stats "$MINIMAL_ENV")

FULL_PKGS=$(echo "$FULL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f1)
FULL_SIZE=$(echo "$FULL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f2)
FULL_BYTES=$(echo "$FULL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f3)

MINIMAL_PKGS=$(echo "$MINIMAL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f1)
MINIMAL_SIZE=$(echo "$MINIMAL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f2)
MINIMAL_BYTES=$(echo "$MINIMAL_STATS" | cut -d'|' -f3)

# --- Display results ---
echo -e "${GREEN}[4/4] Results${NC}"
echo ""
echo -e "${BLUE}┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}│              FULL EARTHACCESS INSTALL                   │${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤${NC}"
printf "${BLUE}│${NC}  Packages installed: %-35s${BLUE}│${NC}\n" "$FULL_PKGS"
printf "${BLUE}│${NC}  Total size:         %-35s${BLUE}│${NC}\n" "$FULL_SIZE"
echo -e "${BLUE}└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘${NC}"
echo ""
echo -e "${BLUE}┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}│           MINIMAL AUTH-ONLY INSTALL                     │${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}│       (requests + tinynetrc + tenacity)                 │${NC}"
echo -e "${BLUE}├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤${NC}"
printf "${BLUE}│${NC}  Packages installed: %-35s${BLUE}│${NC}\n" "$MINIMAL_PKGS"
printf "${BLUE}│${NC}  Total size:         %-35s${BLUE}│${NC}\n" "$MINIMAL_SIZE"
echo -e "${BLUE}└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘${NC}"
echo ""

# Calculate savings
if [ "$FULL_BYTES" -gt 0 ] && [ "$MINIMAL_BYTES" -gt 0 ]; then
    SAVED_BYTES=$((FULL_BYTES - MINIMAL_BYTES))
    SAVED_MB=$(echo "scale=1; $SAVED_BYTES / 1024 / 1024" | bc)
    PERCENT_SAVED=$(echo "scale=1; ($SAVED_BYTES * 100) / $FULL_BYTES" | bc)
    PKG_DIFF=$((FULL_PKGS - MINIMAL_PKGS))
    
    echo -e "${YELLOW}┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐${NC}"
    echo -e "${YELLOW}│                      SAVINGS                            │${NC}"
    echo -e "${YELLOW}├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤${NC}"
    printf "${YELLOW}│${NC}  Packages avoided:   %-35s${YELLOW}│${NC}\n" "$PKG_DIFF"
    printf "${YELLOW}│${NC}  Space saved:        %-35s${YELLOW}│${NC}\n" "${SAVED_MB} MB (${PERCENT_SAVED}%)"
    echo -e "${YELLOW}└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘${NC}"
fi

echo ""
echo -e "${GREEN}Package lists:${NC}"
echo ""
echo "FULL INSTALL packages:"
uv pip list --python "$FULL_ENV/bin/python" 2>/dev/null | tail -n +3 | sort
echo ""
echo "---"
echo ""
echo "MINIMAL INSTALL packages:"
uv pip list --python "$MINIMAL_ENV/bin/python" 2>/dev/null | tail -n +3 | sort

# Cleanup
echo ""
echo -e "${YELLOW}Cleaning up temporary directory...${NC}"
rm -rf "$WORKDIR"
echo -e "${GREEN}Done!${NC}"

View full results

========================================
earthaccess Dependency Size Comparison
========================================

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              FULL EARTHACCESS INSTALL                   │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Packages installed: 32                                 │
│  Total size:         38M                                │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│           MINIMAL AUTH-ONLY INSTALL                     │
│       (requests + tinynetrc + tenacity)                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Packages installed: 7                                  │
│  Total size:         2.0M                               │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                      SAVINGS                            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Packages avoided:   25                                 │
│  Space saved:        31.2 MB (94.6%)                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Package lists:

FULL INSTALL packages:
aiobotocore           3.1.0
aiohappyeyeballs      2.6.1
aiohttp               3.13.3
aioitertools          0.13.0
aiosignal             1.4.0
attrs                 25.4.0
botocore              1.42.19
bounded-pool-executor 0.0.3
certifi               2026.1.4
charset-normalizer    3.4.4
earthaccess           0.15.1
frozenlist            1.8.0
fsspec                2026.1.0
idna                  3.11
importlib-resources   6.5.2
jmespath              1.0.1
multidict             6.7.0
multimethod           2.0.2
pqdm                  0.2.0
propcache             0.4.1
python-cmr            0.13.0
python-dateutil       2.9.0.post0
requests              2.32.5
s3fs                  2026.1.0
six                   1.17.0
tenacity              9.1.2
tinynetrc             1.3.1
tqdm                  4.67.1
typing-extensions     4.15.0
urllib3               2.6.3
wrapt                 2.0.1
yarl                  1.22.0

---

MINIMAL INSTALL packages:
certifi            2026.1.4
charset-normalizer 3.4.4
idna               3.11
requests           2.32.5
tenacity           9.1.2
tinynetrc          1.3.1
urllib3            2.6.3

[jhkennedy]

I think this is a good idea! 4 years-ish ago, we had discussed breaking out an "edlfs" package to handle earthdata login with fsspec but it didn't really go anywhere.

Having just the auth as a small package would enable quite a bit of reuse when building downstream packages that rely on earthdata login.

So it might be time to revisit that again.

Sure would be nice to have an earthaccess org for these kind of things to live under... #929