Software deployment in Python

As mentioned earlier, Python developers are richly blessed in the various tools offered by Python, and its third-party ecosystem in easing and automating the deployment of applications and code written using Python.

In this section, we will briefly take a look at some of these tools.

Packaging Python code

Python comes with built in support for packaging applications for a variety of distributions—source, binary, and specific OS-level packaging.

The primary way of packaging source code in Python is to write a setup.py file. The source can then be packaged with the help of the in-built distutils library, or the more sophisticated and rich setuptools framework.

Before we get introduced to the guts of Python packaging, let us get familiar with a couple of closely related tools, namely, pip and virtualenv.

Pip

Pip stands for the recursive acronym Pip installs packages. Pip is the standard and suggested tool to install packages in Python.

We've seen pip in action throughout...