Python package data

Further down is a minimal example showing how to achieve both:

• packaging a data file file.src in sdist only;

• and packaging another data file file.bin in bdist only;

• additionally it shows how file.all is packaged in both distribution packages and file.not in none of them.

file.bin and built files

Files such as file.bin are not in the original source code of the project (i.e. not in the git source code repository for example) but should still be installed. Typically these files are created during a build step such as ./setup.py build for example (think gettext *.mo messages catalogs).

The gist of it is:

• first and foremost, always thoroughly clean up the working directory between two packaging attempts while tweaking these packaging options (in particular empty the src/Thing.egg-info directory containing the SOURCES.txt file as well as the build, and dist directories) or the results will be inconsistent;

• set the include_package_data option to True;

• file.all and files that belong in both sdist and bdist are specified in MANIFEST.in;

• file.bin and files that belong in bdist only are specified in package_data;

• file.src and files that belong in sdist only are specified in both MANIFEST.in and exclude_package_data;

• file.not and files that do not belong in any distribution package are not specified anywhere.

The directory structure for our example:

.
├ MANIFEST.in
├ setup.py
└ src
    └ thing
        ├ __init__.py
        └ data
            ├ file.all
            ├ file.bin
            ├ file.not
            └ file.src

In MANIFEST.in:

recursive-include src/thing *.all
recursive-include src/thing *.src

In setup.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import setuptools

setuptools.setup(
    exclude_package_data={'thing': ['data/*.src']},
    include_package_data=True,
    package_data={'thing': ['data/*.bin']},
    #
    name='Thing',
    version='1.0.0',
    #
    package_dir={'': 'src'},
    packages=setuptools.find_packages(where='src'),
)

This has been tested with:

• Python 3.6.7

• setuptools 39.0.1

• wheel 0.33.1