Running setup scripts

=====================

Buildouts are often used to work on packages that will be distributed

as eggs. During development, we use develop eggs.  When you've

completed a development cycle, you'll need to run your setup script to

generate a distribution and, perhaps, uploaded it to the Python

package index.  If your script uses setuptools, you'll need setuptools

in your Python path, which may be an issue if you haven't installed

setuptools into your Python installation.

The buildout setup command is helpful in a situation like this.  It

can be used to run a setup script and it does so with the setuptools

egg in the Python path and with setuptools already imported.  The fact

that setuptools is imported means that you can use setuptools-based

commands, like bdist_egg even with packages that don't use setuptools.

To illustrate this, we'll create a package in a sample buildout:

    >>> mkdir('hello')

    >>> write('hello', 'hello.py', 'print "Hello World!"')

    >>> write('hello', 'README', 'This is hello')

    >>> write('hello', 'setup.py',

    ... """

    ... from distutils.core import setup

    ... setup(name="hello",

    ...       version="1.0",

    ...       py_modules=["hello"],

    ...       author="Bob",

    ...       author_email="bob@foo.com",

    ...       )

    ... """)

We can use the buildout command to generate the hello egg:

    >>> print system(buildout +' setup hello -q bdist_egg'),

    Running setup script 'hello/setup.py'.

    zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...

The hello directory now has a hello egg in it's dist directory:

    >>> ls('hello', 'dist')

    -  hello-1.0-py2.4.egg