Distributing Your Application

Once your application works properly, you can create a “tarball” from it by using the setup.py sdist command. The following commands assume your current working directory is the tutorial package we’ve created and that the parent directory of the tutorial package is a virtualenv representing a repoze.bfg environment.

On UNIX:

$ ../bin/python setup.py sdist

On Windows:

c:\bigfntut> ..\Scripts\python setup.py sdist

Warning

If your project files are not checked in to a version control repository (such as Subversion), the dist tarball will not contain all the files it needs to. In particular, it will not contain non-Python-source files (such as templates and static files). To ensure that these are included, check your files into a version control repository before running setup.py sdist.

The output of such a command will be something like:

running sdist
running egg_info
writing requirements to tutorial.egg-info/requires.txt
writing tutorial.egg-info/PKG-INFO
writing top-level names to tutorial.egg-info/top_level.txt
writing dependency_links to tutorial.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
writing entry points to tutorial.egg-info/entry_points.txt
writing manifest file 'tutorial.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
warning: sdist: missing required meta-data: url
warning: sdist: missing meta-data: either (author and author_email) or (maintainer and maintainer_email) must be supplied
creating tutorial-0.1
creating tutorial-0.1/tutorial
creating tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
creating tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates
creating tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static
creating tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
making hard links in tutorial-0.1...
hard linking CHANGES.txt -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking README.txt -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking ez_setup.py -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking setup.cfg -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking setup.py -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking tutorial.ini -> tutorial-0.1
hard linking tutorial/__init__.py -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial/configure.zcml -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial/models.py -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial/run.py -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial/tests.py -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial/views.py -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/PKG-INFO -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/SOURCES.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/dependency_links.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/entry_points.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/not-zip-safe -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/requires.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial.egg-info/top_level.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial.egg-info
hard linking tutorial/templates/edit.pt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates
hard linking tutorial/templates/mytemplate.pt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates
hard linking tutorial/templates/view.pt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/default.css -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/style.css -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/templatelicense.txt -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/images/img01.gif -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/images/img02.gif -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/images/img03.gif -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/images/img04.gif -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
hard linking tutorial/templates/static/images/spacer.gif -> tutorial-0.1/tutorial/templates/static/images
copying setup.cfg -> tutorial-0.1
Writing tutorial-0.1/setup.cfg
creating dist
tar -cf dist/tutorial-0.1.tar tutorial-0.1
gzip -f9 dist/tutorial-0.1.tar
removing 'tutorial-0.1' (and everything under it)

Note that this command creates a tarball in the “dist” subdirectory named tutorial-0.1.tar.gz. You can send this file to your friends to show them your cool new application. They should be able to install it by pointing the easy_install command directly at it. Or you can upload it to PyPI and share it with the rest of the world, where it can be downloaded via easy_install remotely like any other package people download from PyPI.