How to make a Python package in 2021

I hadn't heard of flit, it does seem like it's not brand new on the scene, however it is primarily a single author, so expect a tool which is opinionated and for which the opinions may not necessarily reflect a broad consensus:

https://github.com/takluyver/flit/graphs/contributors

With a title like this, I'd be expecting to see an article describing the latest tools and recommendations from the PyPA, which are here:

https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/

(In short, it's setup.cfg + pyproject.toml, `python3 -m build` to build, twine to upload.)

The PyPA recommendation is old and out of date. Using a system that doesn't manage constraints and hash-checked lockfiles is bad practice.

The recommendation to set up a Makefile on top of tox is a bit odd to be honest. Tox basically "just works", and you can do things like pass stuff to `pytest` by setting up `{posargs}` in the tox config (see [0])

I do feel like tox gets a bad rap despite having a complete feature set. I think a part of it is that the documentation is complete but not organized in the "Tox user"'s perspective, so for someone who shows up on a project using it, it's hard to figure out the quickstart( though the "general tips and tricks" page gets somewhere [1])

Anyways yeah, would not recommend Make over just leaning into tox more here.

EDIT: also, this article reminded me of how much I really dislike Github Action's configuration syntax. Just balls of mud on top of the Docker "ball of mud" strategy. I will re-iterate my belief that a CI system where the configuration system isn't declarative but just like..... procedural Lua will be a billion dollar business. CI is about running commands one after another! If you want declarative DAGs use Bazel

[0]: https://tox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example/pytest.html?hig... [1]: https://tox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example/general.html

The number of extra tools used in this article boggles my mind.

Are you writing a simple library? Create a setup.py. Copy paste an existing setup.py and modify it to suit your purposes. Now you have a working, pip installable python package.

Want to publish to PyPI? Use twine. It's standard and it's simple.

You don't need complicated tooling for simple projects.

Thomas is well know as one of the maintainer of IPython and Jupyter, and developed flit while working on the pep for pyproject.toml and the pip backend allowing things like python -m build.

Though `python -m build` only works _if_ you use something like flit or setup.py in the backend to do build the package and hence why you can set flit as a build-backend.

So yes, flit is one of the latest tool, and yes it is one of the things that push for the ability to use pyproject.toml+python3 -m build, you just seem to miss some subtleties of the toolchain.