6.1. PyPI overview
PyPI lets you submit any number of versions of your distribution to the index.
If you alter the meta-data for a particular version, you can submit it again
and the index will be updated.
PyPI holds a record for each (name, version) combination submitted. The first
user to submit information for a given name is designated the Owner of that
name. Changes can be submitted through the register command or
through the web interface. Owners can designate other users as Owners or
Maintainers. Maintainers can edit the package information, but not designate
new Owners or Maintainers.
By default PyPI displays only the newest version of a given package. The web
interface lets one change this default behavior and manually select which
versions to display and hide.
For each version, PyPI displays a home page. The home page is created from
the long_description which can be submitted via the register
command. See PyPI package display for more information.
6.2. Distutils commands
Distutils exposes two commands for submitting package data to PyPI: the
register command for submitting meta-data to PyPI
and the upload command for submitting distribution
files. Both commands read configuration data from a special file called a
.pypirc file.
6.2.1. The register command
The distutils command register is used to submit your distribution’s
meta-data to an index server. It is invoked as follows:
Distutils will respond with the following prompt:
running register
We need to know who you are, so please choose either:
1. use your existing login,
2. register as a new user,
3. have the server generate a new password for you (and email it to you), or
4. quit
Your selection [default 1]:
Note: if your username and password are saved locally, you will not see this
menu. Also, refer to The .pypirc file for how to store your credentials in a
.pypirc file.
If you have not registered with PyPI, then you will need to do so now. You
should choose option 2, and enter your details as required. Soon after
submitting your details, you will receive an email which will be used to confirm
your registration.
Once you are registered, you may choose option 1 from the menu. You will be
prompted for your PyPI username and password, and register will then
submit your meta-data to the index.
See Additional command options for options to the register command.
6.2.2. The upload command
The distutils command upload pushes the distribution files to PyPI.
The command is invoked immediately after building one or more distribution
files. For example, the command
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload
will cause the source distribution and the Windows installer to be uploaded to
PyPI. Note that these will be uploaded even if they are built using an earlier
invocation of setup.py, but that only distributions named on the command
line for the invocation including the upload command are uploaded.
If a register command was previously called in the same command,
and if the password was entered in the prompt, upload will reuse the
entered password. This is useful if you do not want to store a password in
clear text in a .pypirc file.
You can use the --sign option to tell upload to sign each
uploaded file using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). The gpg program must
be available for execution on the system PATH. You can also specify
which key to use for signing using the --identity=name option.
See Additional command options for additional options to the upload
command.
6.2.3. Additional command options
This section describes options common to both the register and
upload commands.
The --repository or -r option lets you specify a PyPI server
different from the default. For example:
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload -r https://example.com/pypi
For convenience, a name can be used in place of the URL when the
.pypirc file is configured to do so. For example:
python setup.py register -r other
See The .pypirc file for more information on defining alternate servers.
The --show-response option displays the full response text from the PyPI
server, which is useful when debugging problems with registering and uploading.
6.2.4. The .pypirc file
The register and upload commands both check for the
existence of a .pypirc file at the location $HOME/.pypirc.
If this file exists, the command uses the username, password, and repository
URL configured in the file. The format of a .pypirc file is as
follows:
[distutils]
index-servers =
pypi
[pypi]
repository: <repository-url>
username: <username>
password: <password>
The distutils section defines an index-servers variable that lists the
name of all sections describing a repository.
Each section describing a repository defines three variables:
- repository, that defines the url of the PyPI server. Defaults to
https://www.python.org/pypi.
- username, which is the registered username on the PyPI server.
- password, that will be used to authenticate. If omitted the user
- will be prompt to type it when needed.
If you want to define another server a new section can be created and
listed in the index-servers variable:
[distutils]
index-servers =
pypi
other
[pypi]
repository: <repository-url>
username: <username>
password: <password>
[other]
repository: https://example.com/pypi
username: <username>
password: <password>
This allows the register and upload commands to be
called with the --repository option as described in
Additional command options.
Specifically, you might want to add the PyPI Test Repository to your .pypirc to facilitate
testing before doing your first upload to PyPI itself.
6.3. PyPI package display
The long_description field plays a special role at PyPI. It is used by
the server to display a home page for the registered package.
If you use the reStructuredText
syntax for this field, PyPI will parse it and display an HTML output for
the package home page.
The long_description field can be attached to a text file located
in the package:
from distutils.core import setup
with open('README.txt') as file:
long_description = file.read()
setup(name='Distutils',
long_description=long_description)
In that case, README.txt is a regular reStructuredText text file located
in the root of the package besides setup.py.
To prevent registering broken reStructuredText content, you can use the
rst2html program that is provided by the docutils package and
check the long_description from the command line:
$ python setup.py --long-description | rst2html.py > output.html
docutils will display a warning if there’s something wrong with your
syntax. Because PyPI applies additional checks (e.g. by passing --no-raw
to rst2html.py in the command above), being able to run the command above
without warnings does not guarantee that PyPI will convert the content
successfully.