Distribute a Python package with a compiled dynamic shared library

Question

How do I package a Python module together with a precompiled .so library? Specifically, how do I write setup.py so that when I do this in Python

>>> import top_secret_wrapper 

It can easily find top_secret.so without having to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH?

In my module development environment, I have the following file structure:

. ├── top_secret_wrapper │   ├── top_secret.so │   └── __init__.py └── setup.py 

Inside __init__.py, I have something like:

import top_secret 

Here's my setup.py

from setuptools import setup, Extension  setup(     name = 'top_secret_wrapper',     version = '0.1',     description = 'A Python wrapper for a top secret algorithm',     url = None,     author = 'James Bond',     author_email = '[email protected]',     license = 'Spy Game License',     zip_safe = True, ) 

I'm sure my setup.py is lacking a setting where I specify the location of top_secret.so, though I'm not sure how to do that.

Answer 1

What I ended up doing is:

setup(     name='py_my_lib',     version=version,  # specified elsewhere     packages=[''],     package_dir={'': '.'},     package_data={'': ['py_my_lib.so']}, ) 

This way I get to import the lib by its name, and don't have another level of nestedness:

import py_my_lib 

and not

from py_my_lib_wrapper import py_my_lib