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9.3 Distribution

At some point you might want to give your code to someone else, possibly just a co-worker. This section gives the most basic technique of doing that. For more detailed information, you’ll need to consult the Python Packaging User Guide.

Creating a setup.py file

Add a setup.py file to the top-level of your project directory.

# setup.py
import setuptools

setuptools.setup(
    name="porty",
    version="0.0.1",
    author="Your Name",
    author_email="you@example.com",
    description="Practical Python Code",
    packages=setuptools.find_packages(),
)

Creating MANIFEST.in

If there are additional files associated with your project, specify them with a MANIFEST.in file. For example:

# MANIFEST.in
include *.csv

Put the MANIFEST.in file in the same directory as setup.py.

Creating a source distribution

To create a distribution of your code, use the setup.py file. For example:

bash % python setup.py sdist

This will create a .tar.gz or .zip file in the directory dist/. That file is something that you can now give away to others.

Installing your code

Others can install your Python code using pip in the same way that they do for other packages. They simply need to supply the file created in the previous step. For example:

bash % python -m pip install porty-0.0.1.tar.gz

Commentary

The steps above describe the absolute most minimal basics of creating a package of Python code that you can give to another person. In reality, it can be much more complicated depending on third-party dependencies, whether or not your application includes foreign code (i.e., C/C++), and so forth. Covering that is outside the scope of this course. We’ve only taken a tiny first step.

Exercises

Exercise 9.5: Make a package

Take the porty-app/ code you created for Exercise 9.3 and see if you can recreate the steps described here. Specifically, add a setup.py file and a MANIFEST.in file to the top-level directory. Create a source distribution file by running python setup.py sdist.

As a final step, see if you can install your package into a Python virtual environment.