Intro

Few days ago, I published my first python package to pypi. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Description

Tools

build and twine were the two fundamental packages. The build package literally builds a repository into a distributable compressed file. This simple command python3 -m build will create a dist/ directory which contains the tar.gz and whl files.
twine can directly upload your repository to pypi and testpypi. testpypi is nothing more than a test version of pypi. This comes in handy before you publish to pypi in order to get an exact preview.

Structuring

The following is the project tree structure of my tictronome package. Starting from the top, LICENSE file is a simple text file that contains an open source license. The MIT license is widely used.
README.md should contain instructions on how to install and use your package. I personally recommend creating a separate readme file for pypi since it does not render images in my assets folder. For convenience I just used the same README.md file for my GitHub repo.
assests directory contains images and resources associated with my README.md file.
build/ is automatically created by running the build command.
pyproject.toml contains configurations of your build system, such as the version of setuptools required.
setup.cfg is the core configuration file. This will be a roadmap to your build. The .cfg file is a static config file. However you can also use a dynamic configuration file(setup.py). I decided to use the static configfile from this documentation.
test/ contains simple tests for my main scripts.

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ticronome
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── assets
│   ├── color_example.png
│   ├── seconds.gif
│   └── simple-tics.gif
├── build
│   └── bdist.macosx-10.9-x86_64
├── pyproject.toml
├── setup.cfg
├── src
│   └── tictronome
│       ├── __init__.py
│       ├── colors
│       │   ├── __init__.py
│       │   ├── ansi.py
│       │   └── colored_string.py
│       └── tictronome.py
└── tests
    └── test_tic.py

I used the src directory to be my package directory. So if I do a pip install tictronome, then I can import code in the following way.

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from tictronome.tictronome import Tic
from tictronome.colors import ansi
from tictronome.colors import colored_string

Note that Tic in the first line is a class defined in tictronome.py.

Todos

Even after some trial and error, I was not able to perform a direct import. In other words, I could not do this.

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from tictronome import Tic

Still trying to figure out how I could make this happen.

Also, on my next build, I’m considering to use a dynamic configuration file(setup.py) and not use the build package and only using the setuptools package.