How do I create a wheel from a django app?

Question

The reusable app docs (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/intro/reusable-apps/) tells you to list template and static files in MANIFEST.in, but it doesn't look like python setup.py bdist_wheel looks at that file at all.

I've seen references to data_files but those files go in directories relative to the python installation (sys.prefix) and not the package installation (and sys.prefix isn't uniformly related to site-packages across systems).

Am I correct in assuming that myapp/templates/myapp/foo.html should end up in .../site-packages/myapp/templates/myapp/foo.html and similarly for static files, and that the user needs to run a manage.py collectstatic after pip install myapp?

Update (example):

The following structure:

(build2) go|c:\srv\tmp\myapp> tree
.
|-- MANIFEST.in
|-- myapp
|   |-- static
|   |   `-- myapp
|   |       `-- foo.css
|   |-- templates
|   |   `-- myapp
|   |       `-- foo.html
|   |-- urls.py
|   `-- views.py
`-- setup.py

5 directories, 6 files

setup.py

import setuptools
from distutils.core import setup
setup(
    name='myapp',
    version='0.1.0',
    packages=['myapp']
)

MANIFEST.in

recursive-include myapp/templates *
recursive-include myapp/static *

running python setup.py sdist and python setup.py bdist_wheel creates the following files bin myapp/dist:

2016-06-18  13:47             2,073 myapp-0.1.0-py2-none-any.whl
2016-06-18  13:46             2,493 myapp-0.1.0.zip

if you look inside the .zip file, you'll find the templates and static folders, if you rename the .whl file to .zip and look inside it, the directories are not included.

Update 2 (solution):

Changing the MANIFEST.in file to

recursive-include myapp *

and setup.py to

from setuptools import find_packages, setup
setup(
    name='myapp',
    version='0.1.0',
    include_package_data=True,
    packages=['myapp'],
    zip_safe=False,
)

then running python setup.py bdist_wheel will create a .whl file that installs myapp/templates and myapp/static in the expected places.

Answer 1

The MANIFEST.in file needs to be changed to:

recursive-include myapp *

This includes everything under myapp/myapp with the correct paths. In particular, this includes myapp/myapp/templates, which is necessary.

The declaration above also includes myapp/myapp/static which could be useful if you plan to run manage.py collectstatic after installing the .whl file.

In setup.py, the setup function needs to be imported from setuptools (and not distutils), i.e.:

from setuptools import find_packages, setup
setup(
    name='myapp',
    version='0.1.0',
    include_package_data=True,
    packages=['myapp'],
    zip_safe=False,
)

When you now run python setup.py bdist_wheel it will create a .whl file that installs myapp/templates and myapp/static in the expected places.