Easily download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages
Table of Contents
The recommended way to bootstrap setuptools on any system is to download ez_setup.py and run it using the target Python environment. Different operating systems have different recommended techniques to accomplish this basic routine, so below are some examples to get you started.
Setuptools requires Python 2.6 or later. To install setuptools on Python 2.4 or Python 2.5, use the bootstrap script for Setuptools 1.x.
The link provided to ez_setup.py is a bookmark to bootstrap script for the latest known stable release.
For best results, uninstall previous versions FIRST (see Uninstalling).
Using Windows 8 (which includes PowerShell 3) or earlier versions of Windows with PowerShell 3 installed, it's possible to install with one simple Powershell command. Start up Powershell and paste this command:
> (Invoke-WebRequest https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py).Content | python -
You must start the Powershell with Administrative privileges or you may choose to install a user-local installation:
> (Invoke-WebRequest https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py).Content | python - --user
If you have Python 3.3 or later, you can use the py command to install to different Python versions. For example, to install to Python 3.3 if you have Python 2.7 installed:
> (Invoke-WebRequest https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py).Content | py -3 -
The recommended way to install setuptools on Windows is to download ez_setup.py and run it. The script will download the appropriate distribution file and install it for you.
Once installation is complete, you will find an easy_install program in your Python Scripts subdirectory. For simple invocation and best results, add this directory to your PATH environment variable, if it is not already present. If you did a user-local install, the Scripts subdirectory is $env:APPDATA\Python\Scripts.
For Windows without PowerShell 3 or for installation without a command-line, download ez_setup.py using your preferred web browser or other technique and "run" that file.
Most Linux distributions come with wget.
Download ez_setup.py and run it using the target Python version. The script will download the appropriate version and install it for you:
> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python
Note that you will may need to invoke the command with superuser privileges to install to the system Python:
> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python
Alternatively, Setuptools may be installed to a user-local path:
> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python - --user
If your system has curl installed, follow the wget instructions but replace wget with curl and -O with -o. For example:
> curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -o - | python
For more advanced installation options, such as installing to custom locations or prefixes, download and extract the source tarball from Setuptools on PyPI and run setup.py with any supported distutils and Setuptools options. For example:
setuptools-x.x$ python setup.py install --prefix=/opt/setuptools
Use --help to get a full options list, but we recommend consulting the EasyInstall manual for detailed instructions, especially the section on custom installation locations.
All setuptools downloads can be found at the project's home page in the Python Package Index. Scroll to the very bottom of the page to find the links.
In addition to the PyPI downloads, the development version of setuptools is available from the Bitbucket repo, and in-development versions of the 0.6 branch are available as well.
On Windows, if Setuptools was installed using an .exe or .msi installer, simply use the uninstall feature of "Add/Remove Programs" in the Control Panel.
Otherwise, to uninstall Setuptools or Distribute, regardless of the Python version, delete all setuptools* and distribute* files and directories from your system's site-packages directory (and any other sys.path directories) FIRST.
If you are upgrading or otherwise plan to re-install Setuptools or Distribute, nothing further needs to be done. If you want to completely remove Setuptools, you may also want to remove the 'easy_install' and 'easy_install-x.x' scripts and associated executables installed to the Python scripts directory.
Here are some of the available manuals, tutorials, and other resources for learning about Setuptools, Python Eggs, and EasyInstall:
Questions, comments, and bug reports should be directed to the distutils-sig mailing list. If you have written (or know of) any tutorials, documentation, plug-ins, or other resources for setuptools users, please let us know about them there, so this reference list can be updated. If you have working, tested patches to correct problems or add features, you may submit them to the setuptools bug tracker.
Issue #100: When building a distribution, Setuptools will no longer match default files using platform-dependent case sensitivity, but rather will only match the files if their case matches exactly. As a result, on Windows and other case-insensitive file systems, files with names such as 'readme.txt' or 'README.TXT' will be omitted from the distribution and a warning will be issued indicating that 'README.txt' was not found. Other filenames affected are:
- README.rst
- README
- setup.cfg
- setup.py (or the script name)
- test/test*.py
Any users producing distributions with filenames that match those above case-insensitively, but not case-sensitively, should rename those files in their repository for better portability.
Pull Request #72: When using single_version_externally_managed, the exclusion list now includes Python 3.2 __pycache__ entries.
Pull Request #76 and Pull Request #78: lines in top_level.txt are now ordered deterministically.
Issue #118: The egg-info directory is now no longer included in the list of outputs.
Issue #258: Setuptools now patches distutils msvc9compiler to recognize the specially-packaged compiler package for easy extension module support on Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2.
Issue #114: Use sys.getfilesystemencoding for decoding config in bdist_wininst distributions.
Issue #105 and Issue #113: Establish a more robust technique for determining the terminal encoding:
1. Try ``getpreferredencoding`` 2. If that returns US_ASCII or None, try the encoding from ``getdefaultlocale``. If that encoding was a "fallback" because Python could not figure it out from the environment or OS, encoding remains unresolved. 3. If the encoding is resolved, then make sure Python actually implements the encoding. 4. On the event of an error or unknown codec, revert to fallbacks (UTF-8 on Darwin, ASCII on everything else). 5. On the encoding is 'mac-roman' on Darwin, use UTF-8 as 'mac-roman' was a bug on older Python releases. On a side note, it would seem that the encoding only matters for when SVN does not yet support ``--xml`` and when getting repository and svn version numbers. The ``--xml`` technique should yield UTF-8 according to some messages on the SVN mailing lists. So if the version numbers are always 7-bit ASCII clean, it may be best to only support the file parsing methods for legacy SVN releases and support for SVN without the subprocess command would simple go away as support for the older SVNs does.
This release includes a couple of backward-incompatible changes, but most if not all users will find 1.0 a drop-in replacement for 0.9.
Added several features that were slated for setuptools 0.6c12:
Note this release is backward-incompatible with distribute 0.6.23-0.6.34 in how it parses version numbers.
Distribute #303: Make sure the manifest only ever contains UTF-8 in Python 3.
Distribute #329: Properly close files created by tests for compatibility with Jython.
Work around Jython #1980 and Jython #1981.
Distribute #334: Provide workaround for packages that reference sys.__stdout__ such as numpy does. This change should address virtualenv `#359 <https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/359>`_ as long as the system encoding is UTF-8 or the IO encoding is specified in the environment, i.e.:
PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8 pip install numpy
Fix for encoding issue when installing from Windows executable on Python 3.
Distribute #323: Allow setup_requires requirements to supercede installed requirements. Added some new keyword arguments to existing pkg_resources methods. Also had to updated how __path__ is handled for namespace packages to ensure that when a new egg distribution containing a namespace package is placed on sys.path, the entries in __path__ are found in the same order they would have been in had that egg been on the path when pkg_resources was first imported.
- Fixed a missing files problem when using Windows source distributions on non-Windows platforms, due to distutils not handling manifest file line endings correctly.
- Updated Pyrex support to work with Pyrex 0.9.6 and higher.
- Minor changes for Jython compatibility, including skipping tests that can't work on Jython.
- Fixed not installing eggs in install_requires if they were also used for setup_requires or tests_require.
- Fixed not fetching eggs in install_requires when running tests.
- Allow ez_setup.use_setuptools() to upgrade existing setuptools installations when called from a standalone setup.py.
- Added a warning if a namespace package is declared, but its parent package is not also declared as a namespace.
- Support Subversion 1.5
- Removed use of deprecated md5 module if hashlib is available
- Fixed bdist_wininst upload trying to upload the .exe twice
- Fixed bdist_egg putting a native_libs.txt in the source package's .egg-info, when it should only be in the built egg's EGG-INFO.
- Ensure that _full_name is set on all shared libs before extensions are checked for shared lib usage. (Fixes a bug in the experimental shared library build support.)
- Fix to allow unpacked eggs containing native libraries to fail more gracefully under Google App Engine (with an ImportError loading the C-based module, instead of getting a NameError).
- Fixed distutils.filelist.findall() crashing on broken symlinks, and egg_info command failing on new, uncommitted SVN directories.
- Fix import problems with nested namespace packages installed via --root or --single-version-externally-managed, due to the parent package not having the child package as an attribute.
- Added --egg-path option to develop command, allowing you to force .egg-link files to use relative paths (allowing them to be shared across platforms on a networked drive).
- Fix not building binary RPMs correctly.
- Fix "eggsecutables" (such as setuptools' own egg) only being runnable with bash-compatible shells.
- Fix #! parsing problems in Windows .exe script wrappers, when there was whitespace inside a quoted argument or at the end of the #! line (a regression introduced in 0.6c4).
- Fix test command possibly failing if an older version of the project being tested was installed on sys.path ahead of the test source directory.
- Fix find_packages() treating ez_setup and directories with . in their names as packages.
- Fix uploaded bdist_rpm packages being described as bdist_egg packages under Python versions less than 2.5.
- Fix uploaded bdist_wininst packages being described as suitable for "any" version by Python 2.5, even if a --target-version was specified.
- Overhauled Windows script wrapping to support bdist_wininst better. Scripts installed with bdist_wininst will always use #!python.exe or #!pythonw.exe as the executable name (even when built on non-Windows platforms!), and the wrappers will look for the executable in the script's parent directory (which should find the right version of Python).
- Fix upload command not uploading files built by bdist_rpm or bdist_wininst under Python 2.3 and 2.4.
- Add support for "eggsecutable" headers: a #!/bin/sh script that is prepended to an .egg file to allow it to be run as a script on Unix-ish platforms. (This is mainly so that setuptools itself can have a single-file installer on Unix, without doing multiple downloads, dealing with firewalls, etc.)
- Fix problem with empty revision numbers in Subversion 1.4 entries files
- Use cross-platform relative paths in easy-install.pth when doing develop and the source directory is a subdirectory of the installation target directory.
- Fix a problem installing eggs with a system packaging tool if the project contained an implicit namespace package; for example if the setup() listed a namespace package foo.bar without explicitly listing foo as a namespace package.
- Fixed breakages caused by Subversion 1.4's new "working copy" format
- The ez_setup module displays the conflicting version of setuptools (and its installation location) when a script requests a version that's not available.
- Running setup.py develop on a setuptools-using project will now install setuptools if needed, instead of only downloading the egg.
- Fixed AttributeError when trying to download a setup_requires dependency when a distribution lacks a dependency_links setting.
- Made zip-safe and not-zip-safe flag files contain a single byte, so as to play better with packaging tools that complain about zero-length files.
- Made setup.py develop respect the --no-deps option, which it previously was ignoring.
- Support extra_path option to setup() when install is run in backward-compatibility mode.
- Source distributions now always include a setup.cfg file that explicitly sets egg_info options such that they produce an identical version number to the source distribution's version number. (Previously, the default version number could be different due to the use of --tag-date, or if the version was overridden on the command line that built the source distribution.)
- Fix register not obeying name/version set by egg_info command, if egg_info wasn't explicitly run first on the same command line.
- Added --no-date and --no-svn-revision options to egg_info command, to allow suppressing tags configured in setup.cfg.
- Fixed redundant warnings about missing README file(s); it should now appear only if you are actually a source distribution.
- Fix bdist_egg not including files in subdirectories of .egg-info.
- Allow .py files found by the include_package_data option to be automatically included. Remove duplicate data file matches if both include_package_data and package_data are used to refer to the same files.
- Strip module from the end of compiled extension modules when computing the name of a .py loader/wrapper. (Python's import machinery ignores this suffix when searching for an extension module.)
- Added test_loader keyword to support custom test loaders
- Added setuptools.file_finders entry point group to allow implementing revision control plugins.
- Added --identity option to upload command.
- Added dependency_links to allow specifying URLs for --find-links.
- Enhanced test loader to scan packages as well as modules, and call additional_tests() if present to get non-unittest tests.
- Support namespace packages in conjunction with system packagers, by omitting the installation of any __init__.py files for namespace packages, and adding a special .pth file to create a working package in sys.modules.
- Made --single-version-externally-managed automatic when --root is used, so that most system packagers won't require special support for setuptools.
- Fixed setup_requires, tests_require, etc. not using setup.cfg or other configuration files for their option defaults when installing, and also made the install use --multi-version mode so that the project directory doesn't need to support .pth files.
- MANIFEST.in is now forcibly closed when any errors occur while reading it. Previously, the file could be left open and the actual error would be masked by problems trying to remove the open file on Windows systems.
- Fixed the develop command ignoring --find-links.
- The sdist command no longer uses the traditional MANIFEST file to create source distributions. MANIFEST.in is still read and processed, as are the standard defaults and pruning. But the manifest is built inside the project's .egg-info directory as SOURCES.txt, and it is rebuilt every time the egg_info command is run.
- Added the include_package_data keyword to setup(), allowing you to automatically include any package data listed in revision control or MANIFEST.in
- Added the exclude_package_data keyword to setup(), allowing you to trim back files included via the package_data and include_package_data options.
- Fixed --tag-svn-revision not working when run from a source distribution.
- Added warning for namespace packages with missing declare_namespace()
- Added tests_require keyword to setup(), so that e.g. packages requiring nose to run unit tests can make this dependency optional unless the test command is run.
- Made all commands that use easy_install respect its configuration options, as this was causing some problems with setup.py install.
- Added an unpack_directory() driver to setuptools.archive_util, so that you can process a directory tree through a processing filter as if it were a zipfile or tarfile.
- Added an internal install_egg_info command to use as part of old-style install operations, that installs an .egg-info directory with the package.
- Added a --single-version-externally-managed option to the install command so that you can more easily wrap a "flat" egg in a system package.
- Enhanced bdist_rpm so that it installs single-version eggs that don't rely on a .pth file. The --no-egg option has been removed, since all RPMs are now built in a more backwards-compatible format.
- Support full roundtrip translation of eggs to and from bdist_wininst format. Running bdist_wininst on a setuptools-based package wraps the egg in an .exe that will safely install it as an egg (i.e., with metadata and entry-point wrapper scripts), and easy_install can turn the .exe back into an .egg file or directory and install it as such.
- Fixed some problems building extensions when Pyrex was installed, especially with Python 2.4 and/or packages using SWIG.
- Made develop command accept all the same options as easy_install, and use the easy_install command's configuration settings as defaults.
- Made egg_info --tag-svn-revision fall back to extracting the revision number from PKG-INFO in case it is being run on a source distribution of a snapshot taken from a Subversion-based project.
- Automatically detect .dll, .so and .dylib files that are being installed as data, adding them to native_libs.txt automatically.
- Fixed some problems with fresh checkouts of projects that don't include .egg-info/PKG-INFO under revision control and put the project's source code directly in the project directory. If such a package had any requirements that get processed before the egg_info command can be run, the setup scripts would fail with a "Missing 'Version:' header and/or PKG-INFO file" error, because the egg runtime interpreted the unbuilt metadata in a directory on sys.path (i.e. the current directory) as being a corrupted egg. Setuptools now monkeypatches the distribution metadata cache to pretend that the egg has valid version information, until it has a chance to make it actually be so (via the egg_info command).
- Fixed missing gui/cli .exe files in distribution. Fixed bugs in tests.
- Added gui_scripts entry point group to allow installing GUI scripts on Windows and other platforms. (The special handling is only for Windows; other platforms are treated the same as for console_scripts.)
- Added console_scripts entry point group to allow installing scripts without the need to create separate script files. On Windows, console scripts get an .exe wrapper so you can just type their name. On other platforms, the scripts are written without a file extension.
- Added support for building "old-style" RPMs that don't install an egg for the target package, using a --no-egg option.
- The build_ext command now works better when using the --inplace option and multiple Python versions. It now makes sure that all extensions match the current Python version, even if newer copies were built for a different Python version.
- The upload command no longer attaches an extra .zip when uploading eggs, as PyPI now supports egg uploads without trickery.
- The ez_setup script/module now displays a warning before downloading the setuptools egg, and attempts to check the downloaded egg against an internal MD5 checksum table.
- Fixed the --tag-svn-revision option of egg_info not finding the latest revision number; it was using the revision number of the directory containing setup.py, not the highest revision number in the project.
- Added eager_resources setup argument
- The sdist command now recognizes Subversion "deleted file" entries and does not include them in source distributions.
- setuptools now embeds itself more thoroughly into the distutils, so that other distutils extensions (e.g. py2exe, py2app) will subclass setuptools' versions of things, rather than the native distutils ones.
- Added entry_points and setup_requires arguments to setup(); setup_requires allows you to automatically find and download packages that are needed in order to build your project (as opposed to running it).
- setuptools now finds its commands, setup() argument validators, and metadata writers using entry points, so that they can be extended by third-party packages. See Creating distutils Extensions for more details.
- The vestigial depends command has been removed. It was never finished or documented, and never would have worked without EasyInstall - which it pre-dated and was never compatible with.
- The zip-safety scanner now checks for modules that might be used with python -m, and marks them as unsafe for zipping, since Python 2.4 can't handle -m on zipped modules.
- Fix breakage of the "develop" command that was caused by the addition of --always-unzip to the easy_install command.
- Include svn:externals directories in source distributions as well as normal subversion-controlled files and directories.
- Added exclude=patternlist option to setuptools.find_packages()
- Changed --tag-svn-revision to include an "r" in front of the revision number for better readability.
- Added ability to build eggs without including source files (except for any scripts, of course), using the --exclude-source-files option to bdist_egg.
- setup.py install now automatically detects when an "unmanaged" package or module is going to be on sys.path ahead of a package being installed, thereby preventing the newer version from being imported. If this occurs, a warning message is output to sys.stderr, but installation proceeds anyway. The warning message informs the user what files or directories need deleting, and advises them they can also use EasyInstall (with the --delete-conflicting option) to do it automatically.
- The egg_info command now adds a top_level.txt file to the metadata directory that lists all top-level modules and packages in the distribution. This is used by the easy_install command to find possibly-conflicting "unmanaged" packages when installing the distribution.
- Added zip_safe and namespace_packages arguments to setup(). Added package analysis to determine zip-safety if the zip_safe flag is not given, and advise the author regarding what code might need changing.
- Fixed the swapped -d and -b options of bdist_egg.
- The "egg_info" command now always sets the distribution metadata to "safe" forms of the distribution name and version, so that distribution files will be generated with parseable names (i.e., ones that don't include '-' in the name or version). Also, this means that if you use the various --tag options of "egg_info", any distributions generated will use the tags in the version, not just egg distributions.
- Added support for defining command aliases in distutils configuration files, under the "[aliases]" section. To prevent recursion and to allow aliases to call the command of the same name, a given alias can be expanded only once per command-line invocation. You can define new aliases with the "alias" command, either for the local, global, or per-user configuration.
- Added "rotate" command to delete old distribution files, given a set of patterns to match and the number of files to keep. (Keeps the most recently-modified distribution files matching each pattern.)
- Added "saveopts" command that saves all command-line options for the current invocation to the local, global, or per-user configuration file. Useful for setting defaults without having to hand-edit a configuration file.
- Added a "setopt" command that sets a single option in a specified distutils configuration file.
- Added "upload" support for egg and source distributions, including a bug fix for "upload" and a temporary workaround for lack of .egg support in PyPI.
- Beefed up the "sdist" command so that if you don't have a MANIFEST.in, it will include all files under revision control (CVS or Subversion) in the current directory, and it will regenerate the list every time you create a source distribution, not just when you tell it to. This should make the default "do what you mean" more often than the distutils' default behavior did, while still retaining the old behavior in the presence of MANIFEST.in.
- Fixed the "develop" command always updating .pth files, even if you specified -n or --dry-run.
- Slightly changed the format of the generated version when you use --tag-build on the "egg_info" command, so that you can make tagged revisions compare lower than the version specified in setup.py (e.g. by using --tag-build=dev).
- Added develop command to setuptools-based packages. This command installs an .egg-link pointing to the package's source directory, and script wrappers that execfile() the source versions of the package's scripts. This lets you put your development checkout(s) on sys.path without having to actually install them. (To uninstall the link, use use setup.py develop --uninstall.)
- Added egg_info command to setuptools-based packages. This command just creates or updates the "projectname.egg-info" directory, without building an egg. (It's used by the bdist_egg, test, and develop commands.)
- Enhanced the test command so that it doesn't install the package, but instead builds any C extensions in-place, updates the .egg-info metadata, adds the source directory to sys.path, and runs the tests directly on the source. This avoids an "unmanaged" installation of the package to site-packages or elsewhere.
- Made easy_install a standard setuptools command, moving it from the easy_install module to setuptools.command.easy_install. Note that if you were importing or extending it, you must now change your imports accordingly. easy_install.py is still installed as a script, but not as a module.
- Setup scripts using setuptools can now list their dependencies directly in the setup.py file, without having to manually create a depends.txt file. The install_requires and extras_require arguments to setup() are used to create a dependencies file automatically. If you are manually creating depends.txt right now, please switch to using these setup arguments as soon as practical, because depends.txt support will be removed in the 0.6 release cycle. For documentation on the new arguments, see the setuptools.dist.Distribution class.
- Setup scripts using setuptools now always install using easy_install internally, for ease of uninstallation and upgrading.
Added support for "self-installation" bootstrapping. Packages can now include ez_setup.py in their source distribution, and add the following to their setup.py, in order to automatically bootstrap installation of setuptools as part of their setup process:
from ez_setup import use_setuptools use_setuptools() from setuptools import setup # etc...
- Added ez_setup.py installer/bootstrap script to make initial setuptools installation easier, and to allow distributions using setuptools to avoid having to include setuptools in their source distribution.
- All downloads are now managed by the PackageIndex class (which is now subclassable and replaceable), so that embedders can more easily override download logic, give download progress reports, etc. The class has also been moved to the new setuptools.package_index module.
- The Installer class no longer handles downloading, manages a temporary directory, or tracks the zip_ok option. Downloading is now handled by PackageIndex, and Installer has become an easy_install command class based on setuptools.Command.
- There is a new setuptools.sandbox.run_setup() API to invoke a setup script in a directory sandbox, and a new setuptools.archive_util module with an unpack_archive() API. These were split out of EasyInstall to allow reuse by other tools and applications.
- setuptools.Command now supports reinitializing commands using keyword arguments to set/reset options. Also, Command subclasses can now set their command_consumes_arguments attribute to True in order to receive an args option containing the rest of the command line.
- Added new options to bdist_egg to allow tagging the egg's version number with a subversion revision number, the current date, or an explicit tag value. Run setup.py bdist_egg --help to get more information.
- Misc. bug fixes
- Initial release.
