Chapter 15. Packaging – Creating Your Own Libraries or Applications

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packages before, you might remember distribute and distutils2, but it is very important to remember that these have all been replaced by setuptools and distutils and you shouldn't use them anymore!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 commands
• Running tests on the package
• Packages containing C/C++ extensions

Installing packages

Before we actually get started, it is important to know how to install a package properly. There are at least four different...