How to Bootstrap numpy installation in setup.py

Question

I have a project which has a C extension which requires numpy. Ideally, I\'d like whoever downloads my project to just be able to run python setup.py install or

Answer 1

Perhaps a more practical solution is to just require numpy to be installed beforehand and import numpy inside a function scope. @coldfix solution works but compiling numpy takes forever. Much faster to pip install it first as a wheels package, especially now that we have wheels for most systems thanks to efforts like manylinux.

from __future__ import print_function

import sys
import textwrap
import pkg_resources

from setuptools import setup, Extension


def is_installed(requirement):
    try:
        pkg_resources.require(requirement)
    except pkg_resources.ResolutionError:
        return False
    else:
        return True

if not is_installed('numpy>=1.11.0'):
    print(textwrap.dedent("""
            Error: numpy needs to be installed first. You can install it via:

            $ pip install numpy
            """), file=sys.stderr)
    exit(1)

def ext_modules():
    import numpy as np

    some_extention = Extension(..., include_dirs=[np.get_include()])

    return [some_extention]

setup(
    ext_modules=ext_modules(),
)