4. Creating a Source Distribution
As shown in section 1.2, you use the
sdist command to create a source distribution. In the
simplest case,
python setup.py sdist
(assuming you haven't specified any sdist options in the setup
script or config file), sdist creates the archive of the
default format for the current platform. The default format is a gzip'ed
tar file (.tar.gz) on Unix, and ZIP file on Windows.
You can specify as many formats as you like using the --formats option, for example:
python setup.py sdist --formats=gztar,zip
to create a gzipped tarball and a zip file. The available formats are:
| Format | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
zip |
zip file (.zip) | (1),(3) |
gztar |
gzip'ed tar file (.tar.gz) | (2),(4) |
bztar |
bzip2'ed tar file (.tar.bz2) | (4) |
ztar |
compressed tar file (.tar.Z) | (4) |
tar |
tar file (.tar) | (4) |
Notes:
- default on Windows
- default on Unix
- requires either external zip utility or zipfile module (part of the standard Python library since Python 1.6)
- requires external utilities: tar and possibly one of gzip, bzip2, or compress
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Distributing Python Modules |  |
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Release 2.4.1, documentation updated on 30 March 2005.