Running setuptools commands

Historically, setuptools allowed running commands via a setup.py script at the root of a Python project, as indicated in the examples below:

python setup.py --help
python setup.py --help-commands
python setup.py --version
python setup.py sdist
python setup.py bdist_wheel

You could also run commands in other circumstances:

• setuptools projects without setup.py (e.g., setup.cfg-only):

  python -c "from setuptools import setup; setup()" --help
  

• distutils projects (with a setup.py importing distutils):

  python -c "import setuptools; with open('setup.py') as f: exec(compile(f.read(), 'setup.py', 'exec'))" develop
  

That is, you can simply list the normal setup commands and options following the quoted part.

Warning

While it is perfectly fine that users write setup.py files to configure a package build (e.g. to specify binary extensions or customize commands), on recent versions of setuptools, running python setup.py directly as a script is considered deprecated. This also means that users should avoid running commands directly via python setup.py <command>.

If you want to create sdist or wheel distributions the recommendation is to use the command line tool provided by build:

pip install build  # needs to be installed first

python -m build  # builds both sdist and wheel
python -m build --sdist
python -m build --wheel

Build will automatically download setuptools and build the package in an isolated environment. You can also specify specific versions of setuptools, by setting the build requirements in pyproject.toml.

If you want to install a package, you can use pip or installer:

pip install /path/to/wheel/file.whl
pip install /path/to/sdist/file.tar.gz
pip install .  # replacement for python setup.py install
pip install --editable .  # replacement for python setup.py develop

pip install installer  # needs to be installed first
python -m installer /path/to/wheel/file.whl

Command Reference

alias - Define shortcuts for commonly used commands

Sometimes, you need to use the same commands over and over, but you can’t necessarily set them as defaults. For example, if you produce both development snapshot releases and “stable” releases of a project, you may want to put the distributions in different places, or use different egg_info tagging options, etc. In these cases, it doesn’t make sense to set the options in a distutils configuration file, because the values of the options changed based on what you’re trying to do.

Setuptools therefore allows you to define “aliases” - shortcut names for an arbitrary string of commands and options, using setup.py alias aliasname expansion, where aliasname is the name of the new alias, and the remainder of the command line supplies its expansion. For example, this command defines a sitewide alias called “daily”, that sets various egg_info tagging options:

setup.py alias --global-config daily egg_info --tag-build=development

Once the alias is defined, it can then be used with other setup commands, e.g.:

setup.py daily bdist_egg        # generate a daily-build .egg file
setup.py daily sdist            # generate a daily-build source distro
setup.py daily sdist bdist_egg  # generate both

The above commands are interpreted as if the word daily were replaced with egg_info --tag-build=development.

Note that setuptools will expand each alias at most once in a given command line. This serves two purposes. First, if you accidentally create an alias loop, it will have no effect; you’ll instead get an error message about an unknown command. Second, it allows you to define an alias for a command, that uses that command. For example, this (project-local) alias:

setup.py alias bdist_egg bdist_egg rotate -k1 -m.egg

redefines the bdist_egg command so that it always runs the rotate command afterwards to delete all but the newest egg file. It doesn’t loop indefinitely on bdist_egg because the alias is only expanded once when used.

You can remove a defined alias with the --remove (or -r) option, e.g.:

setup.py alias --global-config --remove daily

would delete the “daily” alias we defined above.

Aliases can be defined on a project-specific, per-user, or sitewide basis. The default is to define or remove a project-specific alias, but you can use any of the configuration file options (listed under the saveopts command, below) to determine which distutils configuration file an aliases will be added to (or removed from).

Note that if you omit the “expansion” argument to the alias command, you’ll get output showing that alias’ current definition (and what configuration file it’s defined in). If you omit the alias name as well, you’ll get a listing of all current aliases along with their configuration file locations.

bdist_egg - Create a Python Egg for the project

Warning

eggs are deprecated in favor of wheels, and not supported by pip.

This command generates a Python Egg (.egg file) for the project. Python Eggs are the preferred binary distribution format for EasyInstall, because they are cross-platform (for “pure” packages), directly importable, and contain project metadata including scripts and information about the project’s dependencies. They can be simply downloaded and added to sys.path directly, or they can be placed in a directory on sys.path and then automatically discovered by the egg runtime system.

This command runs the egg_info command (if it hasn’t already run) to update the project’s metadata (.egg-info) directory. If you have added any extra metadata files to the .egg-info directory, those files will be included in the new egg file’s metadata directory, for use by the egg runtime system or by any applications or frameworks that use that metadata.

You won’t usually need to specify any special options for this command; just use bdist_egg and you’re done. But there are a few options that may be occasionally useful:

--dist-dir=DIR, -d DIR

Set the directory where the .egg file will be placed. If you don’t supply this, then the --dist-dir setting of the bdist command will be used, which is usually a directory named dist in the project directory.

--plat-name=PLATFORM, -p PLATFORM

Set the platform name string that will be embedded in the egg’s filename (assuming the egg contains C extensions). This can be used to override the distutils default platform name with something more meaningful. Keep in mind, however, that the egg runtime system expects to see eggs with distutils platform names, so it may ignore or reject eggs with non-standard platform names. Similarly, the EasyInstall program may ignore them when searching web pages for download links. However, if you are cross-compiling or doing some other unusual things, you might find a use for this option.

--exclude-source-files

Don’t include any modules’ .py files in the egg, just compiled Python, C, and data files. (Note that this doesn’t affect any .py files in the EGG-INFO directory or its subdirectories, since for example there may be scripts with a .py extension which must still be retained.) We don’t recommend that you use this option except for packages that are being bundled for proprietary end-user applications, or for “embedded” scenarios where space is at an absolute premium. On the other hand, if your package is going to be installed and used in compressed form, you might as well exclude the source because Python’s traceback module doesn’t currently understand how to display zipped source code anyway, or how to deal with files that are in a different place from where their code was compiled.

There are also some options you will probably never need, but which are there because they were copied from similar bdist commands used as an example for creating this one. They may be useful for testing and debugging, however, which is why we kept them:

--keep-temp, -k

Keep the contents of the --bdist-dir tree around after creating the .egg file.

--bdist-dir=DIR, -b DIR

Set the temporary directory for creating the distribution. The entire contents of this directory are zipped to create the .egg file, after running various installation commands to copy the package’s modules, data, and extensions here.

--skip-build

Skip doing any “build” commands; just go straight to the install-and-compress phases.

develop - Deploy the project source in “Development Mode”

This command allows you to deploy your project’s source for use in one or more “staging areas” where it will be available for importing. This deployment is done in such a way that changes to the project source are immediately available in the staging area(s), without needing to run a build or install step after each change.

The develop command works by creating an .egg-link file (named for the project) in the given staging area. If the staging area is Python’s site-packages directory, it also updates an easy-install.pth file so that the project is on sys.path by default for all programs run using that Python installation.

The develop command also installs wrapper scripts in the staging area (or a separate directory, as specified) that will ensure the project’s dependencies are available on sys.path before running the project’s source scripts. And, it ensures that any missing project dependencies are available in the staging area, by downloading and installing them if necessary.

Last, but not least, the develop command invokes the build_ext -i command to ensure any C extensions in the project have been built and are up-to-date, and the egg_info command to ensure the project’s metadata is updated (so that the runtime and wrappers know what the project’s dependencies are). If you make any changes to the project’s setup script or C extensions, you should rerun the develop command against all relevant staging areas to keep the project’s scripts, metadata and extensions up-to-date. Most other kinds of changes to your project should not require any build operations or rerunning develop, but keep in mind that even minor changes to the setup script (e.g. changing an entry point definition) require you to re-run the develop or test commands to keep the distribution updated.

Here are some of the options that the develop command accepts. Note that they affect the project’s dependencies as well as the project itself, so if you have dependencies that need to be installed and you use --exclude-scripts (for example), the dependencies’ scripts will not be installed either! For this reason, you may want to use pip to install the project’s dependencies before using the develop command, if you need finer control over the installation options for dependencies.

--uninstall, -u

Un-deploy the current project. You may use the --install-dir or -d option to designate the staging area. The created .egg-link file will be removed, if present and it is still pointing to the project directory. The project directory will be removed from easy-install.pth if the staging area is Python’s site-packages directory.

Note that this option currently does not uninstall script wrappers! You must uninstall them yourself, or overwrite them by using pip to install a different version of the package. You can also avoid installing script wrappers in the first place, if you use the --exclude-scripts (aka -x) option when you run develop to deploy the project.

--multi-version, -m

“Multi-version” mode. Specifying this option prevents develop from adding an easy-install.pth entry for the project(s) being deployed, and if an entry for any version of a project already exists, the entry will be removed upon successful deployment. In multi-version mode, no specific version of the package is available for importing, unless you use pkg_resources.require() to put it on sys.path, or you are running a wrapper script generated by setuptools. (In which case the wrapper script calls require() for you.)

Note that if you install to a directory other than site-packages, this option is automatically in effect, because .pth files can only be used in site-packages (at least in Python 2.3 and 2.4). So, if you use the --install-dir or -d option (or they are set via configuration file(s)) your project and its dependencies will be deployed in multi-version mode.

--install-dir=DIR, -d DIR

Set the installation directory (staging area). If this option is not directly specified on the command line or in a distutils configuration file, the distutils default installation location is used. Normally, this will be the site-packages directory, but if you are using distutils configuration files, setting things like prefix or install_lib, then those settings are taken into account when computing the default staging area.

--script-dir=DIR, -s DIR

Set the script installation directory. If you don’t supply this option (via the command line or a configuration file), but you have supplied an --install-dir (via command line or config file), then this option defaults to the same directory, so that the scripts will be able to find their associated package installation. Otherwise, this setting defaults to the location where the distutils would normally install scripts, taking any distutils configuration file settings into account.

--exclude-scripts, -x

Don’t deploy script wrappers. This is useful if you don’t want to disturb existing versions of the scripts in the staging area.

--always-copy, -a

Copy all needed distributions to the staging area, even if they are already present in another directory on sys.path. By default, if a requirement can be met using a distribution that is already available in a directory on sys.path, it will not be copied to the staging area.

--egg-path=DIR

Force the generated .egg-link file to use a specified relative path to the source directory. This can be useful in circumstances where your installation directory is being shared by code running under multiple platforms (e.g. Mac and Windows) which have different absolute locations for the code under development, but the same relative locations with respect to the installation directory. If you use this option when installing, you must supply the same relative path when uninstalling.

In addition to the above options, the develop command also accepts all of the same options accepted by easy_install. If you’ve configured any easy_install settings in your setup.cfg (or other distutils config files), the develop command will use them as defaults, unless you override them in a [develop] section or on the command line.

egg_info - Create egg metadata and set build tags

This command performs two operations: it updates a project’s .egg-info metadata directory (used by the bdist_egg, develop, and test commands), and it allows you to temporarily change a project’s version string, to support “daily builds” or “snapshot” releases. It is run automatically by the sdist, bdist_egg, develop, and test commands in order to update the project’s metadata, but you can also specify it explicitly in order to temporarily change the project’s version string while executing other commands. (It also generates the .egg-info/SOURCES.txt manifest file, which is used when you are building source distributions.)

In addition to writing the core egg metadata defined by setuptools and required by pkg_resources, this command can be extended to write other metadata files as well, by defining entry points in the egg_info.writers group. See the section on Adding new EGG-INFO Files below for more details. Note that using additional metadata writers may require you to include a setup_requires argument to setup() in order to ensure that the desired writers are available on sys.path.

Release Tagging Options

The following options can be used to modify the project’s version string for all remaining commands on the setup command line. The options are processed in the order shown, so if you use more than one, the requested tags will be added in the following order:

--tag-build=NAME, -b NAME

Append NAME to the project’s version string. Due to the way setuptools processes “pre-release” version suffixes beginning with the letters “a” through “e” (like “alpha”, “beta”, and “candidate”), you will usually want to use a tag like “.build” or “.dev”, as this will cause the version number to be considered lower than the project’s default version. (If you want to make the version number higher than the default version, you can always leave off –tag-build and then use one or both of the following options.)

If you have a default build tag set in your setup.cfg, you can suppress it on the command line using -b "" or --tag-build="" as an argument to the egg_info command.

--tag-date, -d

Add a date stamp of the form “-YYYYMMDD” (e.g. “-20050528”) to the project’s version number.

--no-date, -D

Don’t include a date stamp in the version number. This option is included so you can override a default setting in setup.cfg.

(Note: Because these options modify the version number used for source and binary distributions of your project, you should first make sure that you know how the resulting version numbers will be interpreted by automated tools like pip. See the section above on Specifying Your Project’s Version for an explanation of pre- and post-release tags, as well as tips on how to choose and verify a versioning scheme for your project.)

For advanced uses, there is one other option that can be set, to change the location of the project’s .egg-info directory. Commands that need to find the project’s source directory or metadata should get it from this setting:

Other egg_info Options

--egg-base=SOURCEDIR, -e SOURCEDIR

Specify the directory that should contain the .egg-info directory. This should normally be the root of your project’s source tree (which is not necessarily the same as your project directory; some projects use a src or lib subdirectory as the source root). You should not normally need to specify this directory, as it is normally determined from the package_dir argument to the setup() function, if any. If there is no package_dir set, this option defaults to the current directory.

egg_info Examples

Creating a dated “nightly build” snapshot egg:

setup.py egg_info --tag-date --tag-build=DEV bdist_egg

Creating a release with no version tags, even if some default tags are specified in setup.cfg:

setup.py egg_info -RDb "" sdist bdist_egg

(Notice that egg_info must always appear on the command line before any commands that you want the version changes to apply to.)

rotate - Delete outdated distribution files

As you develop new versions of your project, your distribution (dist) directory will gradually fill up with older source and/or binary distribution files. The rotate command lets you automatically clean these up, keeping only the N most-recently modified files matching a given pattern.

--match=PATTERNLIST, -m PATTERNLIST

Comma-separated list of glob patterns to match. This option is required. The project name and -* is prepended to the supplied patterns, in order to match only distributions belonging to the current project (in case you have a shared distribution directory for multiple projects). Typically, you will use a glob pattern like .zip or .egg to match files of the specified type. Note that each supplied pattern is treated as a distinct group of files for purposes of selecting files to delete.

--keep=COUNT, -k COUNT

Number of matching distributions to keep. For each group of files identified by a pattern specified with the --match option, delete all but the COUNT most-recently-modified files in that group. This option is required.

--dist-dir=DIR, -d DIR

Directory where the distributions are. This defaults to the value of the bdist command’s --dist-dir option, which will usually be the project’s dist subdirectory.

Example 1: Delete all .tar.gz files from the distribution directory, except for the 3 most recently modified ones:

setup.py rotate --match=.tar.gz --keep=3

Example 2: Delete all Python 2.3 or Python 2.4 eggs from the distribution directory, except the most recently modified one for each Python version:

setup.py rotate --match=-py2.3*.egg,-py2.4*.egg --keep=1

saveopts - Save used options to a configuration file

Finding and editing distutils configuration files can be a pain, especially since you also have to translate the configuration options from command-line form to the proper configuration file format. You can avoid these hassles by using the saveopts command. Just add it to the command line to save the options you used. For example, this command builds the project using the mingw32 C compiler, then saves the –compiler setting as the default for future builds (even those run implicitly by the install command):

setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 saveopts

The saveopts command saves all options for every command specified on the command line to the project’s local setup.cfg file, unless you use one of the configuration file options to change where the options are saved. For example, this command does the same as above, but saves the compiler setting to the site-wide (global) distutils configuration:

setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 saveopts -g

Note that it doesn’t matter where you place the saveopts command on the command line; it will still save all the options specified for all commands. For example, this is another valid way to spell the last example:

setup.py saveopts -g build --compiler=mingw32

Note, however, that all of the commands specified are always run, regardless of where saveopts is placed on the command line.

Configuration File Options

Normally, settings such as options and aliases are saved to the project’s local setup.cfg file. But you can override this and save them to the global or per-user configuration files, or to a manually-specified filename.

--global-config, -g

Save settings to the global distutils.cfg file inside the distutils package directory. You must have write access to that directory to use this option. You also can’t combine this option with -u or -f.

--user-config, -u

Save settings to the current user’s ~/.pydistutils.cfg (POSIX) or $HOME/pydistutils.cfg (Windows) file. You can’t combine this option with -g or -f.

--filename=FILENAME, -f FILENAME

Save settings to the specified configuration file to use. You can’t combine this option with -g or -u. Note that if you specify a non-standard filename, the distutils and setuptools will not use the file’s contents. This option is mainly included for use in testing.

These options are used by other setuptools commands that modify configuration files, such as the alias and setopt commands.

setopt - Set a distutils or setuptools option in a config file

This command is mainly for use by scripts, but it can also be used as a quick and dirty way to change a distutils configuration option without having to remember what file the options are in and then open an editor.

Example 1. Set the default C compiler to mingw32 (using long option names):

setup.py setopt --command=build --option=compiler --set-value=mingw32

Example 2. Remove any setting for the distutils default package installation directory (short option names):

setup.py setopt -c install -o install_lib -r

Options for the setopt command:

--command=COMMAND, -c COMMAND

Command to set the option for. This option is required.

--option=OPTION, -o OPTION

The name of the option to set. This option is required.

--set-value=VALUE, -s VALUE

The value to set the option to. Not needed if -r or --remove is set.

--remove, -r

Remove (unset) the option, instead of setting it.

In addition to the above options, you may use any of the configuration file options (listed under the saveopts command, above) to determine which distutils configuration file the option will be added to (or removed from).

test - Build package and run a unittest suite

Warning

test is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Users looking for a generic test entry point independent of test runner are encouraged to use tox.

When doing test-driven development, or running automated builds that need testing before they are deployed for downloading or use, it’s often useful to be able to run a project’s unit tests without actually deploying the project anywhere, even using the develop command. The test command runs a project’s unit tests without actually deploying it, by temporarily putting the project’s source on sys.path, after first running build_ext -i and egg_info to ensure that any C extensions and project metadata are up-to-date.

To use this command, your project’s tests must be wrapped in a unittest test suite by either a function, a TestCase class or method, or a module or package containing TestCase classes. If the named suite is a module, and the module has an additional_tests() function, it is called and the result (which must be a unittest.TestSuite) is added to the tests to be run. If the named suite is a package, any submodules and subpackages are recursively added to the overall test suite. (Note: if your project specifies a test_loader, the rules for processing the chosen test_suite may differ; see the test_loader documentation for more details.)

Note that many test systems including doctest support wrapping their non-unittest tests in TestSuite objects. So, if you are using a test package that does not support this, we suggest you encourage its developers to implement test suite support, as this is a convenient and standard way to aggregate a collection of tests to be run under a common test harness.

By default, tests will be run in the “verbose” mode of the unittest package’s text test runner, but you can get the “quiet” mode (just dots) if you supply the -q or --quiet option, either as a global option to the setup script (e.g. setup.py -q test) or as an option for the test command itself (e.g. setup.py test -q). There is one other option available:

--test-suite=NAME, -s NAME

Specify the test suite (or module, class, or method) to be run (e.g. some_module.test_suite). The default for this option can be set by giving a test_suite argument to the setup() function, e.g.:

setup(
    # ...
    test_suite="my_package.tests.test_all"
)

If you did not set a test_suite in your setup() call, and do not provide a --test-suite option, an error will occur.

New in 41.5.0: Deprecated the test command.

upload - Upload source and/or egg distributions to PyPI

The upload command was deprecated in version 40.0 and removed in version 42.0. Use twine instead.

For more information on the current best practices in uploading your packages to PyPI, see the Python Packaging User Guide’s “Packaging Python Projects” tutorial specifically the section on uploading the distribution archives.