8.1 Pure Python distribution (by module)

If you're just distributing a couple of modules, especially if they don't live in a particular package, you can specify them individually using the py_modules option in the setup script.

In the simplest case, you'll have two files to worry about: a setup script and the single module you're distributing, foo.py in this example:

<root>/
        setup.py
        foo.py

(In all diagrams in this section, <root> will refer to the distribution root directory.) A minimal setup script to describe this situation would be:

from distutils.core import setup
setup(name='foo',
      version='1.0',
      py_modules=['foo'],
      )

Note that the name of the distribution is specified independently with the name option, and there's no rule that says it has to be the same as the name of the sole module in the distribution (although that's probably a good convention to follow). However, the distribution name is used to generate filenames, so you should stick to letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens.

Since py_modules is a list, you can of course specify multiple modules, eg. if you're distributing modules foo and bar, your setup might look like this:

<root>/
        setup.py
        foo.py
        bar.py

and the setup script might be

from distutils.core import setup
setup(name='foobar',
      version='1.0',
      py_modules=['foo', 'bar'],
      )

You can put module source files into another directory, but if you have enough modules to do that, it's probably easier to specify modules by package rather than listing them individually.

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