I am trying to package my Python project, which comes with a configuration dotfile that I want copied into the user's home directory on installation. The quick guide to packaging says that this can be done using the data_files
argument to setuptools.setup
. So this is what I have:
data_files = [(os.path.expanduser("~"), [".my_config"])]
This appears to work fine if I use python setup.py install
, but when I upload my package to PyPI and run pip install
the dotfile isn't copied.
FWIW, I've put the dotfile in the MANIFEST.in
and also tried including the package_data
argument to setup
. None of these steps appear to make a difference. If I pip install
and poke around the site-packages
directory, just the source files are here.
How can I achieve what I'm looking for?
To copy a configuration, run the copy-config command. For example, the following command copies the configuration soa.example.com to a new configuration named soa2.example.com . tadm> copy-config --config=soa.example.com soa2.example.com OTD-70201 Command 'copy-config' ran successfully.
Click My Dashboards > Network Configuration > Config Summary. In the NCM Node List widget, click a node name to open the Node Details page. In the menu on the left, click the Configs icon . In the Config List widget, click Import Config.
Most global config files are located in the /etc directory. The /etc/ directory feels more like a filesystem and has many sub-directories, each having related config files. The following is a list of the most useful of these sub-directories: /etc/X11/ – xorg specific config files.
An application configuration file contains settings that are specific to an app. This file includes configuration settings that the common language runtime reads (such as assembly binding policy, remoting objects, and so on), and settings that the app can read.
This is an issue I had once to experience myself. Its root is that when you are building a wheel file, all the absolute paths specified in data_files
will be relativized to the target site-packages
directory, see this issue on github. This influences installations performed by pip install
as it will build a wheel out of any source package (.tar.gz
, .tar.bz2
or .zip
) and install the resulting wheel:
$ pip install spam-0.1.tar.gz
Processing ./spam-0.1.tar.gz
Building wheels for collected packages: spam
Running setup.py bdist_wheel for spam ... done
Stored in directory: /Users/hoefling/Library/Caches/pip/wheels/d0/95/be/bc79f1d589d90d67139481a3e706bcc54578fdbf891aef75c0
Successfully built spam
Installing collected packages: spam
Successfully installed spam-0.1
Checking installed files yields:
$ pip show -f spam
Name: spam
Version: 0.1
...
Location: /Users/hoefling/.virtualenvs/stackoverflow/lib/python3.6/site-packages
Requires:
Files:
Users/hoefling/.my_config
spam-0.1.dist-info/DESCRIPTION.rst
spam-0.1.dist-info/INSTALLER
spam-0.1.dist-info/METADATA
spam-0.1.dist-info/RECORD
spam-0.1.dist-info/WHEEL
spam-0.1.dist-info/metadata.json
spam-0.1.dist-info/top_level.txt
Note the path meant to be absolute is relative to the Location
dir. In the example, .my_config
would be placed under /Users/hoefling/.virtualenvs/stackoverflow/lib/python3.6/site-packages/Users/hoefling/.my_config
.
It gets even better because these built wheels are cached on your disk, so next time you reinstall the package and the built wheel still exists in pip
's cache, it will be used for the installation and you won't even see any mentions of building a wheel in the terminal log.
There is no real solution to avoid this. The most decent workaround I found is to prohibit "binary" packages when installing to enforce the execution of package's setup.py
on installation:
$ pip install spam-0.1.tar.gz --no-binary=spam
Processing ./spam-0.1.tar.gz
Skipping bdist_wheel for spam, due to binaries being disabled for it.
Installing collected packages: spam
Running setup.py install for spam ... done
Successfully installed spam-0.1
The file is now placed correctly:
$ pip show -f spam
Name: spam
Version: 0.1
...
Location: /Users/hoefling/.virtualenvs/stackoverflow/lib/python3.6/site-packages
Requires:
Files:
../../../../../.my_config
spam-0.1-py3.6.egg-info/PKG-INFO
spam-0.1-py3.6.egg-info/SOURCES.txt
spam-0.1-py3.6.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
spam-0.1-py3.6.egg-info/top_level.txt
Unfortunately, the user must be separately informed about calling pip install
with the extra key (via readme, webpage FAQ or similar) as there is no possibility to prohibit building the wheel in package metadata.
As the result, I do not include files with absolute paths anymore. Instead, I install them with the python sources in the site-packages
dir. In the python code, I have to add additional logic for the existence checks and file copying if necessary:
# program entrypoint
if __name__ == '__main__':
config = os.path.join(os.path.expanduser('~'), '.my_config')
if not os.path.exists(config):
shutil.copyfile('.my_config', config)
main.run()
Besides what @hoefling said, I suggest you not using data_files
at all! Because it's really unpredictable where the files will be copied to. You could test this by giving the directory something like ''
, '/'
, or '/anything/you/want'
.
I suggest you use package_data
instead, which just copies the files under the distributed package root on installation. Then you can copy that to anywhere you want at run time.
For more on package_data
, refer to Python Doc https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/setupscript.html#installing-package-data
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