How to include a shared C library in a Python package

Question

I have a project depending on a shared library. To make it clear from the beginning: the shared library is a pure C library and not a Python library. For reasons of simplici

Answer 1

package_data is for data. setup can do the compilation into an *.so.

Following my solution in python setup.py build ctypes.CDLL: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory, I think your setup could employ ext_modules and py_modules, something like

setup(name='pkgtest',
      py_modules=['pkgtest'],
      ext_modules=[Extension('src.libhello', ['src/libhello.c'])]
     )

Answer 2

You can create a Python package which includes shared libraries and works on (almost) any linux distro using manylinux.

The goal of the manylinux project is to provide a convenient way to distribute binary Python extensions as wheels on Linux. This effort has produced PEP 513 which defines the manylinux1_x86_64 and manylinux1_i686 platform tags.

The general procedure is:

1. Build the external library and the Python package inside one of the docker containers provided by the manylinux team (see python-manylinux-demo)
2. Run auditwheel repair to copy the external shared libraries that your package depends on into the Python wheel, setting the RPATH accordingly.

See .travis.yml and build-wheels.sh in the python-manylinux-demo repo for an example.