The chapters thus far have covered how to write, test and, debug the Python code. With all of that, there is only one thing that remains, that is packaging and distributing your Python libraries /and applications. To create installable packages we will use the setuptools
package which is bundled with Python these days. If you have created packages before, you might remember distribute
and distutils2
, but it is very important to remember that these have all been replaced by setuptools
and distutils
and you shouldn't use them anymore!
What types of program can we package with setuptools
? We will show you several cases:
Regular packages
Packages with data
Installing executables and custom
setuptools
commandsRunning tests on the package
Packages containing C/C++ extensions