Question

We use py2app extensively at our facility to produce self contained .app packages for easy internal deployment without dependency issues. Something I noticed recently, and have no idea how it began, is that when building an .app, py2app started including the .git directory of our main library.

commonLib, for instance, is our root python library package, which is a git repo. Under this package are the various subpackages such as database, utility, etc.

commonLib/
    |- .git/ # because commonLib is a git repo
    |- __init__.py
    |- database/
        |- __init__.py
    |- utility/
        |- __init__.py
    # ... etc

In a given project, say Foo, we will do imports like from commonLib import xyz to use our common packages. Building via py2app looks something like: python setup.py py2app

So the recent issue I am seeing is that when building an app for project Foo, I will see it include everything in commonLib/.git/ into the app, which is extra bloat. py2app has an excludes option but that only seems to be for python modules. I cant quite figure out what it would take to exclude the .git subdir, or in fact, what is causing it to be included in the first place.

Has anyone experienced this when using a python package import that is a git repo?
Nothing has changed in our setup.py files for each project, and commonLib has always been a git repo. So the only thing I can think of being a variable is the version of py2app and its deps which have obviously been upgraded over time.

Edit

I’m using the latest py2app 0.6.4 as of right now. Also, my setup.py was first generated from py2applet a while back, but has been hand configured since and copied over as a template for every new project. I am using PyQt4/sip for every single one of these projects, so it also makes me wonder if its an issue with one of the recipes?

Update

From the first answer, I tried to fix this using various combinations of exclude_package_data settings. Nothing seems to force the .git directory to become excluded. Here is a sample of what my setup.py files generally look like:

from setuptools import setup
from myApp import VERSION

appname = 'MyApp'
APP = ['myApp.py']
DATA_FILES = []
OPTIONS = {
    'includes': 'atexit, sip, PyQt4.QtCore, PyQt4.QtGui',
    'strip': True, 
    'iconfile':'ui/myApp.icns', 
    'resources':['src/myApp.png'], 
    'plist':{
        'CFBundleIconFile':'ui/myApp.icns',
        'CFBundleIdentifier':'com.company.myApp',
        'CFBundleGetInfoString': appname,
        'CFBundleVersion' : VERSION,
        'CFBundleShortVersionString' : VERSION
        }
    }

setup(
    app=APP,
    data_files=DATA_FILES,
    options={'py2app': OPTIONS},
    setup_requires=['py2app'],
)

I have tried things like:

setup(
    ...
    exclude_package_data = { 'commonLib': ['.git'] },
    #exclude_package_data = { '': ['.git'] },
    #exclude_package_data = { 'commonLib/.git/': ['*'] },
    #exclude_package_data = { '.git': ['*'] },
    ...
)

Update #2

I have posted my own answer which does a monkeypatch on distutils. Its ugly and not preferred, but until someone can offer me a better solution, I guess this is what I have.

Answer 1

I am adding an answer to my own question, to document the only thing I have found to work thus far. My approach was to monkeypatch distutils to ignore certain patterns when creating a directory or copying a file. This is really not what I wanted to do, but like I said, its the only thing that works so far.

## setup.py ##

import re

# file_util has to come first because dir_util uses it
from distutils import file_util, dir_util

def wrapper(fn):
    def wrapped(src, *args, **kwargs):
        if not re.search(r'/\.git/?', src):
            fn(src, *args, **kwargs) 
    return wrapped       

file_util.copy_file = wrapper(file_util.copy_file)
dir_util.mkpath = wrapper(dir_util.mkpath)

# now import setuptools so it uses the monkeypatched methods
from setuptools import setup

Hopefully someone will comment on this and tell me a higher level approach to avoid doing this. But as of now, I will probably wrap this into a utility method like exclude_data_patterns(re_pattern) to be reused in my projects.