Question

I have a little problem with setuptools/easy_install; maybe someone could give me a hint what might be the cause of the problem:

To easily distribute one of my python webapps to servers I use setuptools’ sdist command to build a tar.gz file which is copied to servers and locally installed using easy_install /path/to/file.tar.gz.

So far this seems to work great. I have listed everything in the MANIFEST.in file like this:

global-include */*.py */*.mo */*.po */*.pot */*.css */*.js */*.png */*.jpg */*.ico */*.woff */*.gif */*.mako */*.cfg

And the resulting tar.gz file does indeed contain all of the files I need.

It gets weird as soon as easy_install tries to actually install it on the remote system. For some reason a directory called locales and a configuration file called migrate.cfg won’t get installed. This is odd and I can’t find any documentaiton about this, but I guess it’s some automatic ignore feature of easy_install?

Is there something like that? And if so, how do I get easy_install to install the locales and migrate.cfg files?

Thanks!

For reference here is the content of my setup.py:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages


requires = ['flup', 'pyramid', 'WebError', 'wtforms', 'webhelpers', 'pil', 'apns', \
            'pyramid_beaker', 'sqlalchemy', 'poster', 'boto', 'pypdf', 'sqlalchemy_migrate', \
            'Babel']

version_number = execfile('pubserverng/version.py')

setup(
    author='Bastian',
    author_email='[e-mail]',
    url='http://domain.de/',
    name = "mywebapp",
    install_requires = requires,
    version = __version__,
    packages = find_packages(),
    zip_safe=False,
    entry_points = {
        'paste.app_factory': [
            'pubserverng=pubserverng:main'
        ]
    },

    namespace_packages = ['pubserverng'],

    message_extractors = { 'pubserverng': [
            ('**.py', 'python', None),
            ('templates/**.html', 'mako', None),
            ('templates/**.mako', 'mako', None),
            ('static/**', 'ignore', None),
            ('migrations/**', 'ignore', None), 
        ]
    },


)

Answer 1

I hate to answer my own question this quickly, but after some trial and error I found out what the reason behind the missing files was. In fact it was more than one reason:

• The SOURCES.txt file was older and included a full list of most files, which resulted in them being bundled correctly.
• The MANIFEST.in file was correct, too, so all required files were actually in the .tar.gz archive as expected. The main problem was that a few files simply would not get installed on the target machine.
• I had to add include_package_data = True, to my setup.py file. After doing that all files installed as expected.

I’ll have to put some research into include_package_data to find out if this weird behavior is documented somewhere. setuptools is a real mess – especially the documentation.