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A helper module for setup.py scripts.

Project description

This Python module will make your setup scripts simpler to write, by automating as much as possible of the ‘boilerplate’ that normally goes into them. Instead of invoking the setup function with a long list of keyword arguments, you just set global variables in your setup script and then invoke the setup_main function, passing globals() as its argument. (The SetupHelper setup.py script itself illustrates this usage.)

The helper module does all the grunt work of translating your variables into keyword arguments, including automatically deducing and generating many arguments so that you only have to specify a much simpler set of data. As a bonus, if you are using Python’s standard distutils, SetupHelper provides (very basic!) support for the requires keyword, downloading and installing required packages for you, as long as their download URLs are available on PyPI. (You can also specify a local directory as a “repository” by setting the environment variable PYPI_LOCAL to point to it–see the CHANGES file in the source archive for details.)

(Note that the distutils in Python 2.5 and later allow the requires keyword in distribution metadata, but do not actually use it to install anything for you. Of course some distutils replacements like setuptools do provide this functionality; if you are using setuptools, you can set the variable __distutils_pkg__ to 'setuptools' and SetupHelper will use setuptools’ support instead of its own. SetupHelper also adds the requires, provides, and obsoletes keywords to your package metadata when you use the setup.py register command with Python versions < 2.5 (in other words, it gives you support for metadata version 1.1 even if your Python version doesn’t.)

Since SetupHelper has all the information needed to determine what should be in your source or binary distribution files, it auto-generates MANIFEST.in each time it runs, so you don’t have to maintain your MANIFEST.in file manually (and if you did, it would get overwritten anyway). Even though it is not strictly necessary to write MANIFEST.in unless you are running a distribution command, SetupHelper does it every time because checking its output can often help you debug problems with the variable definitions in your setup script. (At least, it has certainly helped me to do that!)

As one other bonus, SetupHelper allows you to automate the running of post-install scripts; just set the __post_install__ variable in your setup.py to a list of script names to be run from a subshell (this is done using os.system, so it has the limitations of that Python command). It is desirable to allow post-install scripts to be run from setup.py so that SetupHelper can ensure that any required packages are fully installed by just calling python setup.py install on them once they are unpacked. (Note that, if you are using setuptools, this feature does not work, as setuptools does not actually run python setup.py install to install your package. A future version of SetupHelper might lift this constraint.)

Installation

Of course, to install SetupHelper, you can simply type:

$ python setup.py install

in the directory where you unpacked the SetupHelper archive. However, since SetupHelper is used by setup scripts, you will probably want to include it along with your setup.py in the source archives for your Python projects.

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