Yep, I'm doing the same thing to deploy Python apps on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk... I write an "abstract" app-requirements.txt (which typically just has a sin

Yep, I'm doing the same thing to deploy Python apps on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk... I write an "abstract" app-requirements.txt (which typically just has a single line for my application's own package), create a fresh virtualenv, `pip wheel -r app-requirements.txt` to resolve dependencies and build wheels for all the packages, and finally `pip freeze > pinned-requirements.txt` to create a list of version-pinned packages. Zip it all up and then deploy with `pip install --no-index --find-links=/path/to/wheels -r pinned-requirements.txt`. Et voila! Binary artifacts that don't suddenly break because PyPI goes down or a package maintainer uploads a new version that unexpectedly deprecates an API that you're using.