Question

Ok, so I have been looking around and I have seen a couple different options although i am new to python so i am a bit confused. Here is what I am looking for:

I have a project of multiple .py files. I have my files and a lib directory for the libraries i have created. My question is, how do i setup the project to have a version? I see a lot of articles saying that I put the version in setup.py. Where does setup.py go? what else needs to be in that setup.py file? Do I just import setup.py into my python files? How can i check to see if it worked? How can i check the version of each .py file to make sure it imported correctly?

Answer 1

Read hitchhiker’s guide to packaging to learn good practice for developing a Python project

The setup.py file is at the heart of a Python project. It describes all of the metadata about your project. There a quite a few fields you can add to a project to give it a rich set of metadata describing the project. However, there are only three required fields: name, version, and packages. The name field must be unique if you wish to publish your package on the Python Package Index (PyPI). The version field keeps track of different releases of the project. The packages field describes where you’ve put the Python source code within your project.

Our initial setup.py will also include information about the license and will re-use the README.txt file for the long_description field. This will look like:

from distutils.core import setup

setup(
    name='TowelStuff',
    version='0.1dev',
    packages=['towelstuff',],
    license='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license',
    long_description=open('README.txt').read(),
)