• Distutils
• Tutorial

Introduction to distutils

I have recently used distutils for the first time and thought I would share what I have learned.

Please note: I am not a pro. All this is based on my own hacking and struggling to get things to work. I am sure there will be alternative ways to do things and that I will make mistakes. Caveat Emptor.

(Based on Gnu/Linux)

The layout of folders

A proper layout of your files and folders can really save you trouble later on. I use this layout:

top
|-- package
|   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- module.py
|   `-- things
|       |-- cross.png
|       |-- fplogo.png
|       `-- tick.png
|-- runner
|-- MANIFEST.in
|-- README
`-- setup.py

• top - The very top of the tree is some arbitrary folder, perhaps in your home directory under pythondev. It doesn't matter.
• package - I call it this to indicate that it's where I am developing my package(s).

  (Packages are simply folders with modules (py files) in them. They also have a special file called __init__.py so that Python will know that this folder is a package.)

• package/things - This is where I will keep all my things. Here I have some image files, but you can put anything your module may need here. Naturally you can use any folder name you like.
• The other files are all in the root and will be described soon.

The files

I assume that there will be a single script file that you will use to start your Python app. I call it 'runner' (without the .py) in this example. It will import the actual package. Here is the code:

runner

##This will work in development on a relative folder basis
##It will then work when installed in site-packages on a target system
##where the runner script is in /usr/bin (or wherever)
##
##So, you don't need anything special - no fancy path tricks.

import package.module

package.module.start ()

Next is the package. In this case there is only one module in the package (import package.module), so here is the module: module.py {{{#!/usr/bin/env python2.4

import os, sys

def determine_path ():

• """Borrowed from wxglade.py""" try:

  • root = file if os.path.islink(root):

    • root = os.path.realpath(root)
    return os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(root))
  except:
  • print "I'm sorry, but something is wrong."

    print "There is no file variable. Please contact the author." sys.exit ()

def start ():

• print "module is running" print determine_path () print "My various data files and so on are:" files = [f for f in os.listdir(determine_path () + "/things")] print files

if name == "main":

• print "Decide what to do"

}}} This uses the magic variable __file__ that will return the path and name of the module. Without it you would have to jump through some hoops to locate the module on any given distro or O/S.

• (If you can find this in the Python docs, then your grep-foo is better than mine. I found it by pouring through other Python apps in the site-packages folder of python2.4)