I was reading TIMES on an article about IMF chief Christine Lagarde.

Lagarde is a lawyer by training, and it is kind of misfit for a lady to work in the finance industry, with so many men. But it is not just about her background or gender.

At times, she cannot understand the opaque language that the ministry of finance, or the central-bank governor, or whoever is using.

It turned out to be an advantage for her.

She said this to them:

“Stop it. You’ve lost me. You have to use simple terms that people out on the street will understand, otherwise you are just talking to yourselves.”

How true is that.

Applying the concept to product development, we have to write content in simple language that most people can understand, otherwise we are just writing for ourselves, not the users.

setuptools is a tool to download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages — easily!

If you just need to install other people’s packages, this is NOT for you. All you need is pypi and knowing the command

pip install some-package

setuptools is for the other way round. It is for developers who want to distribute their SDK/library/packages to those “pip install” developers. There are 2 steps.

Step 1) setup.py

Install setuptools. For Mac, it basically downloading and running the egg.

Afterwhich, create a setup.py in the root of your Python project.  A basic template looks like this:

import os
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
 
setup(
    name = "just2us",
    version = "0.0.1",
    author = "Junda Ong",
    author_email = "junda@just2us.com",
    description = "Python SDK for Just2us",
    license = "MIT",
    keywords = "awesome stuff",
    url = "http://www.just2us.com",
    install_requires = ["requests"],
    packages = find_packages(),
    classifiers = [
        "Intended Audience :: Developers",
        "License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License",
        "Programming Language :: Python",
        "Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7",
        "Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules",
    ],
)

As you can see, setup() basically describes various things about your package, such as:

• meta eg. author email
• required dependencies
• classifiers

python setup.py install

Step 2) Upload to Python CheeseShop

But instead of setting up manually, you could make use of Python CheeseShop (pipy) to distribute and setup your package for the Python community. This is the part which connects to pip install.

Firstly, register an account. (Take note: I failed registration a few times, without receiving the validation email. I think that is because of password too short/weak.) The registration is command line based:

python setup.py register

bdist_egg upload --identity="Andrew Carter" --sign --quiet
bdist_wininst --target-version=2.4 register upload --identity="Andrew Carter" --sign --quiet
sdist upload --identity="Andrew Carter" --sign

Versioning

As a bonus, you might want to understand the difference on prerelease and postrelease versions:

• prerelease
  • 1.2rc1 (same as 1.2c1)
  • 1.2rc < 1.2
• postrelease
  • 1.2-r2943 (as in revision 2943)
  • 1.2-r2943 > 1.2