How do I create and load an egg-file in Python?

Question

I am researching for a way to distribute a python module as a single egg-file. Supposing I have a python module called my_module and I want to write a python script that generates an egg-file for my module. So I found setuptools.

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="my_module",
    packages=[my_package],
    version="1.0",
)

And I've had some disadvantages regarding these issues:

This script should be run as python setup.py install. In other words, I need to specify command line arguments. Instead I want to generate my egg-file automatically during my python code, that has its own control over the command line arguments.
The result files are outputed into the setup's file directory. I would like to control the output directory path in the script.
The script create build and dist folders that I don't actually need. Probably, I could solve it by removing the folders after calling setup.

How should I use setuptools for my purposes covering the issues above?

And also how can I load my module from given egg-file?

Supposing I have a following module:

# my_module.py

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self._x = None

    def set_x(self, x):
        self._x = x

    def get_x(self):
        return self._x

I wrote this script to create an egg-file:

# create_egg.py

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="my_module",
    packages=['my_module'],
    version="1.0",
)

I get such error, when I run creage_egg.py:

$ python3 create_egg.py
usage: create_egg.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
   or: create_egg.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
   or: create_egg.py --help-commands
   or: create_egg.py cmd --help

error: no commands supplied

user_3467698 · Answer

First thing I found out is that a package must be a directory. So it's necessary to keep such structure:

my_project/
    my_module/
        __init__.py
    output/
    create_egg.py
test_egg.py

To skip the necessity of specifying the command line arguments there's a special option script_args. I found it here: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools

My __init__.py:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self._x = None

    def set_x(self, x):
        self._x = x

    def get_x(self):
        return self._x

My create_egg.py:

import os
import shutil
from setuptools import setup


OUTPUT_DIR = 'output'


if __name__ == "__main__":
    setup(
        name="my_module",
        packages=['my_module'],
        version="1.0",
        script_args=['--quiet', 'bdist_egg'], # to create egg-file only
    )

    egg_name = os.listdir('dist')[0]

    os.rename(
        os.path.join('dist', egg_name),
        os.path.join(OUTPUT_DIR, egg_name)
    )

    shutil.rmtree('build')
    shutil.rmtree('dist')
    shutil.rmtree('my_module.egg-info')

My test_egg.py:

import sys
sys.path.append('my_project/output/my_module-1.0-py3.5.egg')

import my_module


obj = my_module.MyClass()
obj.set_x(29)
print(obj.get_x())

Creating egg-file:

~/Stuff/my_project $ python3 create_egg.py 
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...

Testing the module:

~/Stuff $ python3 test_egg.py 
29

How do I create and load an egg-file in Python?

1 Answers