An opinionated, minimal cookiecutter template for Python packages, and some guidelines for Python packaging.
pip install cookiecutter
git clone https://github.com/borntyping/cookiecutter-pypackage-minimal.git
cookiecutter cookiecutter-pypackage-minimal/
You should then change the classifiers in {{ package_name }}/setup.py
- it is assumed that the project will run on the latest versions of Python 2 and 3, so you should remove any classifiers that do not apply. The full list of PyPI classifiers can be found here.
Fill out the README, and - if necessary - add a license to the project.
The decisions cookiecutter-pypackage-minimal
makes should all be explained here.
- README should use reStructuredText format This is the format used by most Python tools, is expected by setuptools, and can be used by Sphinx.
- As few README files as possible Additional README files (AUTHORS, CHANGELOG, etc) should be left to the user to create when necessary.
- Use setuptools
It's the standard packaging library for Python.
distribute
has merged back intosetuptools
, anddistutils
is less capable. - setup.py should not import anything from the package
When installing from source, the user may not have the packages dependencies installed, and importing the package is likely to raise an
ImportError
. - setup.py should be the canonical source of package dependencies
There is no reason to duplicate dependency specifiers (i.e. also using a
requirements.txt
file). See the testing section below for testing dependencies.
- Use Tox to manage test environments Tox provides isolation, runs tests across multiple Python versions, and ensures the package can be installed.
- Uses pytest as the default test runner This can be changed easily, though pytest is a easier, more powerful test library and runner than the standard library's unittest.
- Define testing dependencies in
tox.ini
Avoid duplicating dependency definitions, and usetox.ini
as the canonical description of how the unittests should be run.