- Stable versions: https://pypi.org/project/astropy-helpers/
- Development version, issue tracker: https://github.com/astropy/astropy-helpers
Warning
Please note that version v3.0 and later of astropy-helpers does
require Python 3.5 or later. If you wish to maintain Python 2 support
for your package that uses astropy-helpers, then do not upgrade the
helpers to v3.0+. We will still provide Python 2.7 compatible
releases on the v2.0.x branch during the lifetime of the astropy
core package LTS of v2.0.x.
This project provides a Python package, astropy_helpers, which includes
many build, installation, and documentation-related tools used by the Astropy
project, but packaged separately for use by other projects that wish to
leverage this work. The motivation behind this package and details of its
implementation are in the accepted
Astropy Proposal for Enhancement (APE) 4.
The astropy_helpers.extern sub-module includes modules developed elsewhere
that are bundled here for convenience. At the moment, this consists of the
following two sphinx extensions:
- numpydoc, a Sphinx extension developed as part of the Numpy project. This is used to parse docstrings in Numpy format
- sphinx-automodapi, a Sphinx
extension developed as part of the Astropy project. This used to be developed
directly in
astropy-helpersbut is now a standalone package.
Issues with these sub-modules should be reported in their respective repositories, and we will regularly update the bundled versions to reflect the latest released versions.
astropy_helpers includes a special "bootstrap" module called
ah_bootstrap.py which is intended to be used by a project's setup.py in
order to ensure that the astropy_helpers package is available for
build/installation. This is similar to the ez_setup.py module that is
shipped with some projects to bootstrap setuptools.
As described in APE4, the version numbers for astropy_helpers follow the
corresponding major/minor version of the astropy core package, but with an independent sequence of micro (bugfix)
version numbers. Hence, the initial release is 0.4, in parallel with Astropy
v0.4, which will be the first version of Astropy to use astropy-helpers.
For examples of how to implement astropy-helpers in a project,
see the setup.py and setup.cfg files of the
Affiliated package template.
