Question

I developed a program consisting of a package which is executable (i.e. two files x/__init__.py and x/__main__.py), so I can execute it using python -m x, if the package resides in the python path.

I never tried to distribute Python packages/modules and I don’t have any experience in that field (yet)… I already noticed that there are many different systems and now I have three questions:

1. Which system is appropiate for a Python 3(.2) program? distribute? distutils? setuptools?

2. How can I add kind of a “wrapper script” to the distribution that executes the module directly without the hassle with python -m … so that the user can just type x (of course the actual name is a bit more unique 🙂 on the shell.

3. How can I do 2. in a platfom-independent way?

Thanks! 🙂

Answer 1

1. Use either distribute or setuptools, the former is a fork of the latter, with some improvements and better documentation. Either one is a big step up from distutils, which is part of the python standard library.

2. You want a console script, for which you define an entry point:

   entry_points = {
       'console_scripts': [
           'foo = my_package.some_module:main_func',
           'bar = other_module:some_func',
       ],
   

   where foo and bar would be scripts that you can call on the command line. The indicated function will be called with sys.argv[1:] as the first and only argument.

3. Let the installation tools take care of that; it works fine on Windows. 🙂