Package your code to share it with other developers. For example, to share a library for other developers to use in their application, or for development tools like ‘py.test’.
An advantage of this method of distribution is its well established ecosystem of tools such as PyPI and pip, which make it easy for other developers to download and install your package either for casual experiments, or as part of large, professional systems.
It is a well-established convention for Python code to be shared this way. If your code isn’t packaged on PyPI, then it will be harder for other developers to find it and to use it as part of their existing process. They will regard such projects with substantial suspicion of being either badly managed or abandoned.
The downside of distributing code like this is that it relies on the recipient understanding how to install the required version of Python, and being able and willing to use tools such as pip to install your code’s other dependencies. This is fine when distributing to other developers, but makes this method unsuitable for distributing applications to end-users.
The Python Packaging Guide provides an extensive guide on creating and maintaining Python packages.
To distribute applications to end-users, you should freeze your application.
On Linux, you may also want to consider creating a Linux distro package (e.g. a .deb file for Debian or Ubuntu.)
If you’re writing an open source Python module, PyPI , more properly known as The Cheeseshop, is the place to host it.
If you want to install packages from a source other than PyPI (say, if your packages are proprietary), you can do it by hosting a simple HTTP server, running from the directory which holds those packages which need to be installed.
Showing an example is always beneficial
For example, if you want to install a package called MyPackage.tar.gz, and assuming this is your directory structure:
Go to your command prompt and type:
This runs a simple HTTP server running on port 9000 and will list all packages (like MyPackage). Now you can install MyPackage using any Python package installer. Using pip, you would do it like:
Having a folder with the same name as the package name is crucial here. I got fooled by that, one time. But if you feel that creating a folder called MyPackage and keeping MyPackage.tar.gz inside that is redundant, you can still install MyPackage using:
pypiserver is a minimal PyPI compatible server. It can be used to serve a set of packages to easy_install or pip. It includes helpful features like an administrative command (-U) which will update all its packages to their latest versions found on PyPI.