make distutils in Python automatically find packages

Question

I would recommend using the find_packages() function available with setuptools such as:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

and then do

packages=find_packages()

The easiest way (that I know of) is to use pkgutil.walk_packages to yield the packages:

from distutils.core import setup
from pkgutil import walk_packages

import mypackage

def find_packages(path=__path__, prefix=""):
    yield prefix
    prefix = prefix + "."
    for _, name, ispkg in walk_packages(path, prefix):
        if ispkg:
            yield name

setup(
    # ... snip ...
    packages = list(find_packages(mypackage.__path__, mypackage.__name__)),
    # ... snip ...
)

Same as dm76 answer, just that I also have tests in my repo, so I use:

from setuptools import find_packages

packages=find_packages(exclude=["*.tests", "*.tests.*", "tests.*", "tests"]),

import re, os
def find_packages(path='.'):
    ret = []
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path):
        if '__init__.py' in files:
            ret.append(re.sub('^[^A-z0-9_]+', '', root.replace('/', '.')))
    return ret

setup(
...
packages = find_packages()
...
)