In my Node.JS projects, I save my project metadata into package.json: dependencies, version number, author, description, and so on. This makes it so anyone can clone my project and run npm install to create a virtually identical local environment.
Is there a such thing for Python? Some sort of standard file where I can save project metadata, including a version number and PIP dependencies?
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Python setuptools is a module that you use to write a script, called setup.py in the main directory of your Python project. For distribution purposes, you can use your setup.py to make a Python egg. 9000’s link goes into more detail about how to make the egg.
The first link contains detailed documentation on how to write the perfect setup.py, but below is a complete example modified for a Python project I wrote some time ago.
from setuptools import setup
def readme():
"""
This is a function I wrote to read my README file and return it.
"""
with open('README.rst') as f:
return f.read()
setup(name='stackexample',
version='0.1',
description='An answer to a question on StackOverflow',
long_description=readme(), # Get that README.rst
classifiers=[
'Development Status :: 3 - Alpha',
'License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License',
'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.0'
],
keywords='questions answers programming',
url='http://stackexchange.com/',
author_email='[email protected]',
license='MIT',
entry_points = {
'console_scripts' :
['stackex=stackexample.command_line:main']
},
packages=['stackexample'],
install_requires=[
"requests",
"something_on_pip",
],
test_suite='nose.collector',
test_requires=['nose', 'nose-cover3'], # Requirements for the test suite
include_package_data=True,
zip_safe=False)
You can also use a requirements.txt file to list dependencies. This blog post goes into pretty good detail about the difference between requirements.txt and setup.py.