Flit is a simple way to put Python packages and modules on PyPI.

Say you're writing a module foobar—either as a single file foobar.py, or as a directory—and you want to distribute it.

1. Make sure that foobar's docstring starts with a one-line summary of what the module is, and that it has a __version__:

   """An amazing sample package!"""
   
   __version__ = '0.1'

2. Create a file flit.ini next to the module. It should look like this:

   [metadata]
   module=foobar
   author=Sir Robin
   author-email=robin@camelot.uk
   home-page=http://github.com/sirrobin/foobar
   
   # If you want command line scripts, this is how to declare them.
   # If not, you can leave this section out completely.
   [scripts]
   # foobar:main means the script will do: from foobar import main; main()
   foobar=foobar:main

   You can use flit init to easily create a basic flit.ini file for your package.

   Besides the details shown above, there are other fields you can add—see the flit.ini page of the docs.

3. Install flit if you don't already have it:

   pip install flit
   

4. Run this command to upload your code to PyPI:

   flit wheel --upload
   

If your package is not registered on PyPI yet, flit will try to register it for you during the upload step.

To install a package locally for development, run:

flit install [--symlink]

Note

Flit only creates packages in the new 'wheel' format. People using older versions of pip (<1.5) or easy_install will not be able to install them. People may also want a traditional sdist for other reasons, such as Linux distro packaging. I hope that these problems will diminsh over time.

Flit packages a single importable module or package at a time, using the import name as the name on PyPI. All subpackages and data files within a package are included automatically.

Flit requires Python 3, but you can use it to distribute modules for Python 2, so long as they can be imported on Python 3.