Fairlie Reese

Bioinformatic analysis · Bioinformatics software/pipeline development · Long-read RNA-seq

Creating a PyPi library

06 July 2022

While writing my first python software library, Swan, I struggled to figure out how to upload my library to the Python Package Index (PyPi, or pip), to make it installable from the command line. Hopefully these instructions will help someone else that’s interested in learning how.

Uploading your library to PyPi for the first time

  1. Create your library locally with the directory structure my_library/my_library. Your .py files should be in my_library/my_library.
  2. Make sure your library is importable (ie import my_library).
  3. Create a PyPi account here if you don’t already have one.
  4. In the directory above your .py files, (ie my_library/), create the following files:
    • setup.py
    • setup.cfg
    • LICENSE.txt
    • (optional) README.txt
  5. Edit setup.py.
    • See here for an example and instructions on what to put in this file
    • See here for a list of valid classifiers you can use in this file
    • Note: You can automatically generate a list of python libraries that are required for yours to run (necessary for the install_requires section of setup.py) using pipreqs. This will automatically write all imported packages in your library to a requirements.txt file. These requirements are strict and you may want to relax these requirements if you believe your library will work with other versions of these requirements. 
      pip install pipreqs
pipreqs ~/mortazavi_lab/bin/swan_vis/swan_vis/
  6. Edit setup.cfg. You can likely just use this file.
  7. Edit LICENSE.txt. If you want to use the MIT license, use this file.
  8. Install setuptools 
    pip install setuptools
  9. In the directory my_library/, run: 
    python setup.py sdist
  10. Install twine, which will upload your library to PyPi 
    pip install twine
  11. Make another account for TestPyPi if you don’t have one already (TestPyPi and PyPi are separate from one another).
  12. Upload your library to TestPyPi first by running the following command in the my_library/ directory: 
    twine upload --repository-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ dist/*
  13. From any directory on your computer, test your upload by installing from TestPyPi: 
    pip install -i https://test.pypi.org/pypi/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple my_library
  14. Try to import your newly-installed library in python. Start python and run: 
    import my_library

    You can and should also try some simple tests using the functionality of your library to ensure that it works.

  15. After verifying that it worked, you are ready to upload your library to real PyPi. Run the following line of code in the my_library/ directory: 
    twine upload dist/*
  16. Now, you should be able to pip install your library from anywhere, and any computer (with internet access) using: 
    pip install my_library

Updating your library on PyPi

  1. Create a new release of your library on GitHub
  2. Replace the download_url in setup.py with the link to the tar.gz file containing your release on GitHub.
  3. Replace version in setup.py with the new version number that you assigned to your release on GitHub.
  4. Remove the old package versions from your previous PyPi upload including the following folders: 
    dist/
my_library.egg_info/

    If you don’t remove these, twine will try to reupload an old distribution, and PyPi cannot accommodate two libraries with the same name / version ID.

  5. Run the following code in my_library/ 
    python setup.py sdist
  6. Upload your library to TestPyPi and test it by running steps 12-14 from above.
  7. Upload your library to normal PyPi by running step 15 above

References / additional resources: