meain/blog

Dec 28, 2018 . 3 min

Publishing a console application to pypi

Let's say you have a very useful python script that you use and think other people might have some use out of it.

One way is to just share the python snippet, but nah, that is too old school. Let us publish it to pypi so that anyone can just do a pip install your-awsome-tool and get going with it.

So, how to do it? #

Well, let us create a simple project. Maybe a simple countdown timer.

I am gonna call the project counterer because I am too lazy to come up with a better name.

Here is the initial project structure.

.
├── README.md
├── counterer
│   └── counterer.py
└── setup.py

Pretty simple, the main work comes in setup.py.

Create our counter application #

Here is a sample counterer.py.

import time
import sys


def main():
    count = int(sys.argv[1])
    for i in reversed(range(count)):
        print(i)
        time.sleep(1)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Configuring setup.py file #

There is a sample file at the bottom of the blog.

Setting up a description for pypi project page #

We can use the README.md of our project as the description (long_description) of out project. For that just use python to read the file and use it. You have to set two values in setuptools.setup

The values to be set are:

Setting up classifiers #

Pypi uses classifiers as a way to tag projects, it is passed in as the value classifiers in setuptools.setup function. Set the classifiers you need as a list. More info and a list of classifiers can be found at https://pypi.org/classifiers/.

Providing requirements for project #

You can provide the requirements of your project in install_requires. It is just a list of strings.

You could either provide it manually here or just read it from the requirements.txt in your project.

It will be something like.

install_requires = ["psutil", "pprint"]

You pass that on to setuptools.setup as install_requires

Specifying entry_points #

This is where we define the name of our cli application in setuptools.setup.

In our case, the value will be

{ "console_scripts": ["counter = counterer.counterer:main"] }

With this defined, you can use the command counter and python will call the main function in the counterer package in the counterer project.

Calling setuptools.setup #

Finally you can call setuptools.setup will all the values.

A few other values that you have to pass that I did not mention are

A sample #

Let us see what a sample setup.py file looks like.

import setuptools

with open("README.md", "r") as fh:  # description to be used in pypi project page
    long_description = fh.read()

classifiers = [
    "Programming Language :: Python :: 3",
    "License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License",
    "Operating System :: OS Independent",
]

install_requires = []  # any requirements your package has

setuptools.setup(
    name="counterer",
    version="0.0.1",
    author="Abin Simon",
    author_email="abinsimon10@gmail.com",
    description="Simple counter",
    url="https://github.com/meain/counterer",
    long_description=long_description,
    long_description_content_type='text/markdown',
    packages=["counterer"],
    install_requires=install_requires,
    keywords=["counter", "python"],
    classifiers=classifiers,
    entry_points={"console_scripts": ["counter = counterer.counterer:main"]},
)

Publishing to Pypi #

Now that we have our project ready, we just have to publish it. Register for an account if you do not have one at https://pypi.org/account/register/.

Run the following commands to publish it to pypi.

More info about it at https://pypi.org/project/twine/.

Aaaand we are done #

You can check out the code here.

There you go, now anyone can install your package by using

pip3 install counterer

After installation they can call

counter 10

to set a countdown timer for 10 seconds.

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