How to run a python script installed from distutils

Question

I have a medium sized python command line program that runns well from my source code, and I've created a source distribution file and installed it into the virtual environment using "python setup.py install"

Since this is a pure Python program, and provided that the end users have installed Python, and the required packages, my idea is that i can distribute it through PyPi for all available platforms as a source distribution.

Upon install, I get an 'appname' directory within the virtualenv site-packages directory, and it also runs correctly when I write "python 'pathtovirtualenv'/Lib/sitepackages/'myappname'

But is this the way the end user is supposed to run distutils-distributed programs from the command line.

I fnd a lot of information on how to distribute a program using distutils, but not on how the end user is supposed to launch it after installing it.

Answer 1

Since you already created a setup.py, I would recommend looking at the entry_points:

  entry_points={
      'console_scripts': [
          'scriptname=yourpackage.module:function',
      ],
  },

Here, you have a package named yourpackage, and a module named module in it, and you refer to the function function. This function will wrapped by the script called scriptname, which will be installed in the users bin folder, which is normally in the $PATH, so the user can simply type scriptname after he installed your package via pip install.

To sum up: a user will install the package via pip install yourpackage and finally be able to call the function in module via script name.

Here are some docs on this topic:

https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/setuptools.html#automatic-script-creation http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/command-line-scripts.html

Answer 2

Well, I eventually figured it out.

Initially, I wanted to just use distutils, I like it when the end user can install it with minimum of extra dependencies. But I have now discovered that setuptools is the better option in my case.

My directory structure looks like this (Subversion):

trunk
  |-- appname
  |     |-- __init__.py   # an empty file
  |     |-- __main__.py   # calls appname.main()
  |     |-- appname.py    # contains a main() and imports moduleN
  |     |-- module1.py
  |     |-- module2.py
  |     |-- ...
  |-- docs
  |     |-- README
  |     |-- LICENSE
  |     |-- ...
  |-- setup.py

And my setyp.py basically looks like this:

# This setup file is to be used with setuptools source distribution
# Run "python setup sdist to deploy

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

setup( name = "appname",
       ...
       include_package_data = True,
       packages = find_packages(),
       zip_safe = True,
       entry_points = {
           'console_scripts' : 'appname=appname.appname:main'
       }
   )

The next step now is to figure out how to install the contents of the docs directory on the users computer.

But right now, I'm thinking about adding --readme, --license, --changes, --sample (and so forth) options to the main script, to display them at run time.