How can I get the version defined in setup.py (setuptools) in my package?

Question

How could I get the version defined in setup.py from my package (for --version, or other purposes)?

Answer 1

This should also work, using regular expressions and depending on the metadata fields to have a format like this:

__fieldname__ = 'value'

Use the following at the beginning of your setup.py:

import re
main_py = open('yourmodule.py').read()
metadata = dict(re.findall("__([a-z]+)__ = '([^']+)'", main_py))

After that, you can use the metadata in your script like this:

print 'Author is:', metadata['author']
print 'Version is:', metadata['version']