flit 0.3

A simple packaging tool for simple packages.

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=[e-mail]
   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

   There are other fields you can add - see the pkg.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

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.