Diving In

Real artists ship. Or so says Steve Jobs. Do you want to release a Python script, library, framework, or application? Excellent. The world needs more Python code. Python 3 comes with a packaging framework called Distutils. Distutils is many things: a build tool (for you), an installation tool (for your users), a package metadata format (for search engines), and more. It integrates with the Python Package Index (“PyPI”), a central repository for open source Python libraries.

All of these facets of Distutils center around the setup script, traditionally called setup.py. In fact, you’ve already seen several Distutils setup scripts in this book. You used Distutils to install httplib2 in HTTP Web Services and again to install chardet in Case Study: Porting chardet to Python 3.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how the setup scripts for chardet and httplib2 work, and you’ll step through the process of releasing your own Python software.