The standard library contains the distutils
library, a collection of functionality related to packaging and distributing Python code. However, both the distutils
documentation (https://docs.python.org/3/library/distutils.html) and the official packaging guide recommend against using it and instead direct you to use setuptools
.
The setuptools
library is an extension of the distutils
library that adds some important functionality such as dependency handling; although it is not part of the standard library, it is included in the official distributions for Windows and macOS, and is readily available from the package repositories of most Linux distributions. setuptools
is used by the pip
package installer, and we can use it to create packages that can be installed on any system with Python and pip
.