flot 0.6.1

Flot is a simple tool to easily build multiple packages (wheel and sdist) from a single repo without having to create a subdir or another repo for each package, and by simply listing which files to include.

Flot is a simple way to create one or more Python packages from a single repository or code tree, just listing the files you want top include.

Because “Explicit is better than implicit” and “Simple is better than complex.”

You can now have multiple pyproject.toml files and enjoy the benefits of a simpler monolithic code layout and still be able to easily share and package multiple Pypi packages to foster reuse of subsets of your larger project.

Other tools assume that you can only build a single Python package from a given directory or repository and use a lot of magic to find which module or file to include in your package.

flot takes the magic away: you just specify a list of paths or path patterns for the files you want to include in your package. No mystery! Include data files, multiple modules or any files as easily as listing their paths.

See Why use Flot? for more details.

Flot is derived from and based on a modified Flit https://github.com/pypa/flit/ by Thomas Kluyver @takluyver

It was started following this discussion https://github.com/pypa/flit/discussions/669

Install

$ pip install flot

Usage

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. Install flot if you don’t already have it:

   pip install flot

2. Create a pyproject.toml file in the directory containing the module. It will look something like this:

   [build-system]
   requires = ["flot"]
   build-backend = "flot.buildapi"
   
   [project]
   name = "foobar"
   version = "1.0.0"
   description = "foobar frobinator"
   authors = [{name = "Sir Robin", email = "[e-mail]"}]
   
   [project.urls]
   Home = "https://github.com/sirrobin/foobar"
   
   [tool.flot]
   includes = ["foobar.py"]

   You can edit this file to add other metadata, for example to set up command line scripts. See the pyproject.toml page of the documentation.

3. Run this command to build your wheel in the dist/ directory:

   flot

Once your package is published to PyPI (like with the twine tool), people can install it using pip or any other Python packaging tool just like any other package.

4. Say you’re writing a second module baz as a single file baz.py. Just create a second file named for instance baz-pyproject.toml. It will look something like this:

   [build-system]
   requires = ["flot"]
   build-backend = "flot.buildapi"
   
   [project]
   name = "baz"
   version = "1.0.0"
   description = "baz frobinator"
   authors = [{name = "Sir Robin", email = "[e-mail]"}]
   
   [project.urls]
   Home = "https://github.com/sirrobin/foobar"
   
   [tool.flot]
   includes = ["baz.py"]

5. Run this command to build a second wheel in the dist/ directory:

   flot --pyproject baz-pyproject.toml