Packaging resources with setuptools/distribute

Question

I\'m developing an Python egg that has several .txt dependencies (they\'re templates used to generate files by the egg itself), and I\'m struggling to get those dependencies

Answer 1

Have you looked at the setuptools documentation for including package data here: https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#including-data-files

Basically, you just need to set include_package_data=True in your setup.py file. If you are using subversion or CVS, all versioned files will be included. If not, you can specify which files to include with a MANIFEST.in file.

I believe distribute supports this as well.

You can then access the files as you would without them being packaged. i.e. in main.py you could have:

import os.path
f = open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),'templates','file1.txt'))
print f.read()
f.close()

and this would work in the packaged version as well. One caveat is that you will have to also set zip_safe = False in setup.py so that all the files are unzipped during installation.