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 copied to site-packages during setup.py install. According to the distribute documentation...

Filesystem of my package:

setup.py
package
|--- __init__.py
|--- main.py
|--- binary (calls main.py with pkg_resources.load_entry_point)
|--- templates
     |--file1.txt
     |--file2.txt

In setup.py:

setup(
    [...]
    eager_resources = ['templates/file1.txt', 'templates/file2.txt']
)

Within my package:

from pkg_resources import resource_string
tpl = resource_string(__name__, 'templates/file1.txt')

...this combination of configuration and filesystem should result in file1.txt and file2.txt being available through pkg_resources.resource_string. Unfortunately, they're not being copied to site-packages during setup.py install. What am I missing?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have you looked at the setuptools documentation for including package data here: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#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.