Question

I would like to call the C compiler from my setup.py by using platformer instead of Extension(). How do I add a custom build step to setup.py so that it is run with python setup.py build or any of the other build (bdist_*) commands?

Answer 1

I don’t know what ‘platformer’ is. I assume that you want a complete control over how C extensions are built while providing the same interface for packaging tools.

A possible way: Cython defines its custom built_ext command that could be used as:

from distutils.core import setup
from distutils.extension import Extension
from Cython.Distutils import build_ext

setup(
    cmdclass = {'build_ext': build_ext},
    ext_modules = [Extension("example", ["example.pyx"])]
)

A simpler option might be just to include generated C sources into your source tarball and use standard built_ext, Extension classes in setup.py. It would provide the best compatibility with existing tools.