Summary
In this chapter, we looked at how to package and distribute Python projects through the Python Package Index. We started with some theory about packaging and introduced the concepts of projects, releases, and distributions on PyPI.
We talked about setuptools, the most widely used packaging library for Python, and worked through the process of preparing a project for packaging with setuptools. In the process, we saw various files that need to be added to a project to package it and what each of them is for. We discussed the metadata that you should provide to describe your project and help users find it on PyPI, as well as how to add our code and data files to our distribution, how to specify our dependencies, and how to define entry points so that pip will automatically generate scripts for us. We also looked at the tools that Python gives us to query the distribution metadata from our code and how to access packaged data resources in our code.
We moved on to talk...