7. Uploading Packages to the Package Index¶
The Python Package Index (PyPI) not only stores the package info, but also the package data if the author of the package wishes to. The distutils command upload pushes the distribution files to PyPI.
The command is invoked immediately after building one or more distribution files. For example, the command
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload
will cause the source distribution and the Windows installer to be uploaded to
PyPI. Note that these will be uploaded even if they are built using an earlier
invocation of setup.py
, but that only distributions named on the command
line for the invocation including the upload command are uploaded.
The upload command uses the username, password, and repository URL
from the $HOME/.pypirc
file (see section The .pypirc file for more on this
file). If a register command was previously called in the same command,
and if the password was entered in the prompt, upload will reuse the
entered password. This is useful if you do not want to store a clear text
password in the $HOME/.pypirc
file.
You can specify another PyPI server with the --repository=*url*
option:
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload -r http://example.com/pypi
See section The .pypirc file for more on defining several servers.
You can use the --sign
option to tell upload to sign each
uploaded file using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). The gpg program must
be available for execution on the system PATH
. You can also specify
which key to use for signing using the --identity=*name*
option.
Other upload options include --repository=
or
--repository=
where url is the url of the server and
section the name of the section in $HOME/.pypirc
, and
--show-response
(which displays the full response text from the PyPI
server for help in debugging upload problems).
7.1. PyPI package display¶
The long_description
field plays a special role at PyPI. It is used by
the server to display a home page for the registered package.
If you use the reStructuredText syntax for this field, PyPI will parse it and display an HTML output for the package home page.
The long_description
field can be attached to a text file located
in the package:
from distutils.core import setup
with open('README.txt') as file:
long_description = file.read()
setup(name='Distutils',
long_description=long_description)
In that case, README.txt
is a regular reStructuredText text file located
in the root of the package besides setup.py
.
To prevent registering broken reStructuredText content, you can use the
rst2html program that is provided by the docutils
package and
check the long_description
from the command line:
$ python setup.py --long-description | rst2html.py > output.html
docutils
will display a warning if there’s something wrong with your
syntax.