Starting a new Python project from the scratch is boring and error prone:

• Create a setup.py script
• Configure documentation
• Provide installation instructions
• A README file
• etc...

This time-consuming and error prone work gives little satisfaction, but is necessary to make your project a good citizen in the open source community.

Boilerplate produces skeletons for your Python projects so you can get up and running fast. It is influenced by this blog post: http://jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/08/16/open-sourcing-a-python-project-the-right-way/, although we do not follow these recommendations by the letter.

The filesystem structure

We start a python-boilerplate skeleton by calling the python-boilerplate init command on the root directory of your project. It creates the following tree:

.
|- .gitignore
|- LICENSE
|- MANIFEST.in
|- INSTALL.rst
|- README.rst
|- VERSION
|- requirements.txt
|- setup.py
|- docs/
|   |- index.rst
|   |- apidoc.rst
|   |- changelog.rst
|   |  ...
|   |- conf.py
|   |- make.bat
|   |- Makefile
|   |- _static/*
|   \- _templates/*
\- src/
    \- <project>
        |- __init__.py
        |- __meta__.py
        |- <project>.py
        \- tests/
            |- __init__.py
            |- __meta__.py
            \- test_<project>.py

setup.py

The main entry point for installation and management of your project. We provide a minimum working script based on setuptools. In order to avoid duplication of work, the setup.py script reuses the project description from the README.rst file and versioning is controlled by a separate VERSION file. Users still have to edit this file and provide the short description of the project.

Don't forget to python setup.py register your project to PyPI before it is too late!

src/*

python-boilerplate separates the source code for your project under the src/ folder. This contrasts with another typical approach of leaving the python packages directly in the root of the the source tree. We believe that this approach creates projects that are more organized and manageable in the long run.

We also create a "<package>.tests" module for the unit tests and distribute it with the main package. The drawback of this approach is a slightly larger distribution. In most systems, this small price is greatly offset by the ability to ask users to easily run tests in bug reports. python-boilerplate creates a __main__.py file in the tests package so users can run the test suite simply by calling python -m <package>.tests.

docs/*

python-boilerplate creates the skeleton for a Sphinx_-based documentation. The documentation reuses both the README.rst and INSTALL.rst files. In most cases, it is probably a good idea to create a relatively small README.rst file with a small overview of your project and leave most details of the documentation to specific files inside the docs/ directory.

The README.rst file in python-boilerplate itself is perhaps too big ;-)

_ Sphinx: https://sphinx-doc.org

README.rst and INSTALL.rst

We provide a default INSTALL.rst file with generic installation instructions for Python packages. Unless your project requires something fancy, this probably can be left as is.

The README.rst file, however, provides a detailed overview of your project. You should edit this file to provide a meaningful description, otherwise a not so flattering default will be used. The contents of README.rst are also displayed in the index page of the project's documentation.

VERSION

Your project's version is conveniently centralized in a single file. The setup.py script uses this value to register you package and it also saves the correct version in the <package>.__version__ attribute in your module.

You may bump versions using an invoke task:

$ inv bump-version

This method assumes that the version string is in the form "<major>.<minor>.<micro>".

requirements.txt

The requirements.txt uses the - e . directive to tell pip to search for the requirements in the setup.py script. As a general rule, dependencies should be specified only in the install_requires flag in your setup.py.

You may want to use your requirements.txt to freeze packages to specific versions by adding lines such as:

my-package==1.2.3

Freezing makes sense for packages that are meant to run only on their own private environments such as a Django project running in it own virtualenv or docker container.

MANIFEST.in

Defines files to be included in the source distributions created by setuptools.

LICENSE

Python boilerplate accepts the most common open source licenses (or at least it should). If the license you want to use is not supported, we gladly accept patches!

.gitignore

The default .gitignore excludes python bytecode and all build directories.