Question

I want to create a setup.py which would install my files into custom directories. I have a certain prefix, where I would like to get the following result:

/my/prefix/
  bin/
    script.sh
  libexec/
    one.py
    two.py
    ...
  lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/
    package/...

My initial project is following:

/
  script.sh
  one.py
  two.py
  ...
  setup.py
  package/...
    __init__.py
    ...

What would be the best way to achieve that? I would like to be able to install it later with something like:

python setup.py install --prefix=/my/prefix

I can get "package" nicely installed in the correct directory as lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages under --prefix is the default location. But is there a clean way to get script.sh into "bin" and other python files into "libexec"? The only way I see to achieve that would be to manually copy those files in my setup.py script. Maybe there is a cleaner and more standard way to do that?

Answer 1

The scripts are handled by use of the scripts parameter to the setup function. For libexec you can treat them as data files and use a data options.

setup(...
    scripts=glob("bin/*"),
    data_files=[(os.path.join(sys.prefix, 'libexec', 'mypackage'), glob("libexec/*"))],
    ...
)

I’m not sure how that would work with a --prefix option, I’ve never tried that.