Project: flit

A simple packaging tool for simple packages.

Project Details

Latest version
3.9.0
Home Page
None
PyPI Page
https://pypi.org/project/flit/

Project Popularity

PageRank
0.00311644641716246
Number of downloads
168205

Flit is a simple way to put Python packages and modules on PyPI. It tries to require less thought about packaging and help you avoid common mistakes. See Why use Flit? <https://flit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/rationale.html>_ for more about how it compares to other Python packaging tools.

Install

::

$ python3 -m pip install flit

Flit requires Python 3 and therefore needs to be installed using the Python 3 version of pip.

Python 2 modules can be distributed using Flit, but need to be importable on Python 3 without errors.

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. Make sure that foobar's docstring starts with a one-line summary of what the module is, and that it has a __version__:

    .. code-block:: python

    """An amazing sample package!"""
    
    __version__ = "0.1"
    
  2. Install flit if you don't already have it::

    python3 -m pip install flit
    
  3. Run flit init in the directory containing the module to create a pyproject.toml file. It will look something like this:

    .. code-block:: ini

    [build-system]
    requires = ["flit_core >=3.2,<4"]
    build-backend = "flit_core.buildapi"
    
    [project]
    name = "foobar"
    authors = [{name = "Sir Robin", email = "robin@camelot.uk"}]
    dynamic = ["version", "description"]
    
    [project.urls]
    Home = "https://github.com/sirrobin/foobar"
    

    You can edit this file to add other metadata, for example to set up command line scripts. See the pyproject.toml page <https://flit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pyproject_toml.html#scripts-section>_ of the documentation.

    If you have already got a flit.ini file to use with older versions of Flit, convert it to pyproject.toml by running python3 -m flit.tomlify.

  4. Run this command to upload your code to PyPI::

    flit publish
    

Once your package is published, people can install it using pip just like any other package. In most cases, pip will download a 'wheel' package, a standard format it knows how to install. If you specifically ask pip to install an 'sdist' package, it will install and use Flit in a temporary environment.

To install a package locally for development, run::

flit install [--symlink] [--python path/to/python]

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.