Simplify your setup.py

---

Writing a setup.py typically involves lots of boilerplate and copy-pasting from project to project.

This package aims to simplify that and bring some DRY principle to python packaging. Here's what your (complete, and ready to ship to pypi) setup.py could look like with setupmeta:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="myproject",
    versioning="distance",          # Optional, would activate tag-based versioning
    setup_requires="setupmeta"      # This is where setupmeta comes in
)

And that should be it - setupmeta will take it from there, extracting everything else from the rest of your project (following typical conventions commonly used).

You can use the explain command (see commands) to see what setupmeta deduced from your project, for the above it would look something like this (you can see which file and which line each setting came from, note that a lot of info is typically extracted from your project, if you follow usual conventions):

~/myproject: python setup.py explain

          author: (auto-adjust     ) Your Name
              \_: (myproject.py:7  ) Your Name<your@email.com>
    author_email: (auto-adjust     ) your@email.com
     description: (README.rst:1    ) First line of your README
    entry_points: (entry_points.ini) [console_scripts] ...
install_requires: (requirements.txt) ["click", ...
         license: (auto-fill       ) MIT
long_description: (README.rst      ) Long description would be your inlined README
            name: (explicit        ) myproject
      py_modules: (auto-fill       ) ["myproject"]
  setup_requires: (explicit        ) ["setupmeta"]
         version: (git             ) 1.2.3.post2
      versioning: (explicit        ) distance

See examples for more.

Note: setupmeta's versioning is based on:

git describe --dirty --tags --long --first-parent --match 'v*.*'

# Then, if above yields nothing, we try the more vague '*.*'

git describe --dirty --tags --long --first-parent --match '*.*'

you will need git version >= 1.8.4 if you wish to use setupmeta's versioning capabilities.

Goal

The goal of this project is to:

• Allow to write very short (yet complete) setup.py-s, without boilerplate, and encourage good common packaging practices
• Point out missing important info (example: version) in setup.py explain
• Support tag-based versioning (like setuptools_scm, but with super simple configuration/defaults and automated bump capability)
• Provide useful Commands to see the metadata (explain), version (including support for bumping versions), cleanall, etc

How it works?

• Everything that you explicitly provide in your original setuptools.setup() call is taken as-is (never changed), and internally labelled as explicit. So if you don't like something that setupmeta deduces, you can always explicitly state it.
• name is auto-filled from your setup.py's __title__ (if there is one, sometimes having a constant is quite handy...)
• packages and package_dir is auto-filled accordingly if you have a <name>/__init__.py or src/<name>/__init__.py file
• py_modules is auto-filled if you have a <name>.py file
• entry_points is auto-filled from file entry_points.ini (bonus: tools like PyCharm have a nice syntax highlighter for those)
• install_requires is auto-filled if you have a requirements.txt (or pinned.txt) file, pinning is abstracted away by default as per community recommendation, see requirements for more info.
• tests_require is auto-filled if you have a tests/requirements.txt, or requirements-dev.txt, or dev-requirements.txt, or test-requirements.txt file
• description will be the 1st line of your README (unless that 1st line is too short, or is just the project's name), or the 1st line of the first docstring found in the scanned files (see list below)

• long_description is auto-filled from your README file (looking for README.rst, README.md, then README*, first one found wins). Special tokens can be used (notation aimed at them easily being rst comments):

  • .. [[end long_description]] as end marker, so you don't have to use the entire file as long description
  • .. [[include <relative-path>]] if you want another file included as well (for example, people like to add HISTORY.txt as well)
  • these tokens must appear either at beginning/end of line, or be after/before at least one space character

• version can be stated explicitly, or be computed from git tags using versioning=... (see versioning for more info):

  • With versioning="distance", your git tags will be of the form v{major}.{minor}.0, the number of commits since latest version tag will be used to auto-fill the "patch" part of the version:

    • tag "v1.0.0", no commits since tag -> version is "1.0.0"
    • tag "v1.0.0", 5 commits since tag -> version is "1.0.5"
    • if checkout is dirty, a marker is added -> version would be "1.0.5.post5.dirty"

  • With versioning="post", your git tags will be of the form v{major}.{minor}.{patch}, a "post" addendum will be present if there are commits since latest version tag:

    • tag "v1.0.0", no commits since tag -> version is "1.0.0"
    • tag "v1.0.0", 5 commits since tag -> version is "1.0.0.post5"
    • if checkout is dirty, a marker is added -> version would be "1.0.0.post5.dirty"

  • With versioning="build-id", your git tags will be of the form v{major}.{minor}.0, the number of commits since latest version tag will be used to auto-fill the "patch" part of the version:

    • tag "v1.0.0", no commits since tag, BUILD_ID=12 -> version is "1.0.0+h12.g123"
    • tag "v1.0.0", no commits since tag, BUILD_ID not defined -> version is "1.0.0+hlocal.g123"
    • tag "v1.0.0", 5 commits since tag, BUILD_ID=12 -> version is "1.0.5+h12.g456"
    • tag "v1.0.0", 5 commits since tag, BUILD_ID not defined -> version is "1.0.5+hlocal.g456"
    • if checkout is dirty, a marker is added -> version would be "1.0.5+hlocal.g456.dirty"

  • Use the bump command (see commands) to easily bump (ie: increment major, minor or patch + apply git tag)
  • Version format can be customized, see versioning for more info

• version, versioning, url, download_url, bugtrack_url, license, keywords, author, contact, maintainer, and platforms will be auto-filled from:

  • Lines of the form __key__ = "value" in your modules (simple constants only, expressions are ignored - the modules are not imported but scanned using regexes)
  • Lines of the form key: value in your docstring

  • Files are examined in this order (first find wins):

    • setup.py
    • <package>.py (mccabe for example)
    • <package>/__about__.py (cryptography for example)
    • <package>/__version__.py (requests for example)
    • <package>/__init__.py (changes, arrow for example)
    • src/ is also examined (for those who like to have their packages under src)

  • URLs can be simplified:

    • if url points to your general github repo (like: https://github.com/codrsquad), the name of your project is auto-appended to it
    • relative urls are auto-filled by prefixing them with url
    • urls may use {name} and/or {version} markers, it will be expanded appropriately

  • author, maintainer and contact names and emails can be combined into one line (setupmeta will figure out the email part and auto-fill it properly)

    • i.e.: author: Bob D bob@example.com will yield the proper author and author_email settings

This should hopefully work nicely for the vast majority of python projects out there. If you need advanced stuff, you can still leverage setupmeta for all the usual stuff above, and go explicit wherever needed.

Motivation

My motivation was to:

• stop having to boilerplate my setup.py's
• learn how to publish to pypi (and do it right, once and for all)
• have a nice workflow for when I want to publish to pypi (setup.py explain to see what's up at a glance)

I noticed that most open-source projects out there do the same thing over and over, like:

• Read the entire contents of their README file and use it as long_description (copy-pasting the few lines of code to read the contents of said file)
• Reading, grepping, sometimes importing a small __version__.py or __about__.py file to get values like __version__ out of it, and then dutifully doing version=__version__ or version=about["__version__"] in their setup.py
• All kinds of creative things to get the description
• etc.

I didn't want to keep doing this anymore myself, so I decided to try and do something about it with this project.

Roadmap

• Support more SCMs, like hg

Test coverage

Since setupmeta is designed to be used as setup_requires, it is important it doesn't break in any edge case, as that would be disruptive to all clients.

Test coverage is at 100%, and should remain at that at all times. If you are contributing, please craft test cases that exercise all possible edge cases.