Python Packaging Guide

This guide is intended to explain modern Python packaging, it covers most of the core components of a modern package, and explains these components. It is broken up into the following sections:

Using the Template

With this guide is a cookiecutter template which allows you to get started quickly with a package as described in this guide.

To create a new package based on the template run:

$ pip install cookiecutter cruft
$ cruft create https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/packaging-guide

and go through the steps offered in the cli naming your package and filling in your details. Cruft is built on cookiecutter, and enables the updating of the template from the source. This takes the form of pull requests to the repository that the new package is pushed to. If a package already has a cookiecutter template, it can be linked to the parent repository using cruft link url-to-template.

To manually check whether the current environment matches with the template then cruft check will tell you what the current status is. cruft update will manually trigger an updating of the package to the template.

If you would like to stick to simply the cookiecutter approach, the template still supports that functionality thusly:

$ pip install cookiecutter
$ cookiecutter gh:OpenAstronomy/packaging-guide -o ./output_directory

This will create a new directory in your current directory named the same as the value of “packagename” you supplied. Change into this directory and run git init to make it into a git repository, and make an initial commit. This is required in order to have software versioning working for your package.

The goal of the template is to quickly get you setup with the files described in the guide. The template currently implements the following optional flags, all of which default to off:

  • include_example_code: This option will fill your new package with some example functions to allow you to test it.

  • use_compiled_extensions: This turns on the features needed to support compiled extensions as described in Compiled C/Cython extensions.

  • enable_dynamic_dev_versions: This enables a feature which ensures that my_package.__version__ always returns the current git version as calculated by setuptools_scm when the package is installed as an editable install. See Dynamic Development Versions for more details.