Excluding a top-level directory from a setuptools package

Question

I'm trying to put a Python project into a tarball using setuptools. The problem is that setuptools doesn't appear to like the way that the source tree was originally setup (not by me, I must add). Everything that I actually want to distribute is in the top-level directory, rather than in a subdirectory like the setuptools docs talk about.

The tree has a directory, tests, that I don't want to have in the released package. However, using exclude_package_data doesn't seem to actually do any excluding, and I'd like to work out what I've done wrong.

My setup.py looks like this, in relevant part:

setup(   name="project",   packages=[''],   include_package_data=True,   exclude_package_data={'': ['tests']},   test_suite='nose.collector', ) 

Answer 1

We use the following convention to exclude 'tests' from packages.

setup(    name="project",    packages=find_packages(exclude=("tests",)),    include_package_data=True,     test_suite='nose.collector', ) 

We also use MANIFEST.in to better control what include_package_data=True does.

Answer 2

I have wasted several hours on the same problem, trying to exclude a module, I finally found that I had to remove the *.egg-info and build directories, that somehow retained the idea that the module had to be included.