How To Package Your Python Code

I've wondered why using a dictionary to initialize <i>setuptools.setup()</i> isn't more advocated in such guides. I understand this is superficial, but imho, this looks much clearer than the author's suggestion [1]:<p><pre><code> from setuptools import setup kw = { 'name' : 'funniest', 'version' : '0.1', 'description' : 'The funniest joke in the world', 'url' : 'http://github.com/storborg/funniest', 'author' : 'Flying Circus', 'author_email' : 'flyingcircus@example.com', 'license' : 'MIT', 'packages' : ['funniest'], 'zip_safe' : False, } if __name__ == '__main__': setup(**kw) </code></pre> Here are a few of my <i>setup.py</i> files that follow this convention [2] [3] [4].<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/minimal.html#creating-the-scaffolding" rel="nofollow">http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/minimal.html#cr...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/gvalkov/harstats-graphite/blob/master/setup.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gvalkov/harstats-graphite/blob/master/set...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://github.com/gvalkov/jenkins-autojobs/blob/master/setup.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gvalkov/jenkins-autojobs/blob/master/setu...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/gvalkov/python-evdev/blob/master/setup.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gvalkov/python-evdev/blob/master/setup.py</a>

Taking a quick look through this it looks pretty good! I find that beginners have tons of trouble navigating the slightly tricky waters that is packaging in Python, so more resources is great.<p>One thing I think is missing is to point out <i></i>not<i></i> to use setuptools, but to use the less broken, more maintained, drop in replacement distribute (<a href="http://guide.python-distribute.org/" rel="nofollow">http://guide.python-distribute.org/</a>). That website also has some further information on the packaging ecosystem that's worth flipping through.

The fact that there is no good, canonical guide for doing this in Python is one of the reasons I moved away from it and toward Ruby. With Ruby I had no problems writing and forking gems using the canonical guide (<a href="http://guides.rubygems.org/make-your-own-gem/" rel="nofollow">http://guides.rubygems.org/make-your-own-gem/</a>). With Python, navigating the hell that is packaging is just demoralizing when it comes time to give end users a complicated chunk of code. (Setuptools is truly "a hack on a top of a bad design", not my own words.) I hope for Python's own sake that distribute (<a href="http://packages.python.org/distribute/" rel="nofollow">http://packages.python.org/distribute/</a>) catches on and people are simply shamed out of using older tools, but since Python already has a problem with getting everyone to migrate code away from old things, I'm not holding my breath.<p>I'm still not sure how to do certain things "right", e.g., distribute a modified version of somebody else's package with my own package. In Ruby, I can do this with bundler specifying a git repo for my own fork of the gem (and then submit a pull request for the original fork, if it's a patch that's useful upstream).

Here are other good packaging guides for Python (by Tarek Ziade). I think Scott Torbog has joined the ranks of these greats:<p><a href="http://www.aosabook.org/en/packaging.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.aosabook.org/en/packaging.html</a><p><a href="http://guide.python-distribute.org/" rel="nofollow">http://guide.python-distribute.org/</a>

Are setuptools suitable for packaging the whole web application (for example in Django) together with html/js/css files, configs for uwsgi and some management scripts?<p>I once tried to do something like this and failed and I had an impression that setuptools are not really intended for such things, but mainly for packaging plain Python modules.<p>Is this a right impression? If yes, what is a good way to package the whole Python based web application?

I know this isn't exactly related to packaging the code, but any thoughts on utilities like py2exe (<a href="http://www.py2exe.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.py2exe.org/</a>), cx_Freeze (<a href="http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/</a>) or pyinstaller (<a href="http://www.pyinstaller.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pyinstaller.org/</a>) for distributing finished python modules to end-users?

You guys might also find this github project useful: <a href="https://github.com/splaice/py-bootstrap" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/splaice/py-bootstrap</a>

ive been writing python for ages but never found a simple introduction to how to package modules - always thought it was voodoo, so thanks a lot! so simple...

I apologize for the spam, but apparently I'm unable to save articles for some reason. I'd like to read this later, and I want to see if a comment will work.

While I've already been doing things a similar way, it's nice to have a clean, clear explanation of how to package stuff.

Awesome job. I had been stressing about getting my code up there but your tutorial made it easy.

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for the last few weeks and couldn't find :)