Mastering Python

Package data

In most cases you probably won't have to include the package data, but in the cases where you do need data to go with your package, there are a few different options. First, it is important to know which files are included in your package by default:

• Python source files in the package directories recursively
• The setup.py and setup.cfg files
• Tests: test/test*.py
• All *.txt and *.py files in the examples directory
• All *.txt files in the root directory

So after the defaults, we have the first solution: the package_data argument to the setup function. The syntax for that is simple enough, a dictionary where the keys are the packages and the values are the patterns to include:

package_data = {
    'docs': ['*.rst'],
}

The second solution is using a ...