Setup parameters

The previous chapters have actually already shown us a couple of examples, but let's reiterate and review what the most important parts actually do. The core function you will be using in this entire chapter is setuptools.setup.

Note

For the most simple packages, the distutils package bundled with Python will be sufficient as well, but I recommend setuptools regardless. The setuptools package has many great features that distutils lacks and nearly all Python environments will have setuptools available anyhow.

Before we continue, make sure you have the latest version of both pip and setuptools:

pip install -U pip setuptools

Note

The setuptools and distutils packages have changed significantly over the last few years and the documentation/examples written before 2014 are most likely out of date. Be careful not to implement deprecated examples and skip any documentation/examples using distutils.

Now that we have all the prerequisites, let's create an example containing...