Far McKon

If you want to test a python package before you share it with the universe, you can (in theory) use the Python Package Index Test (testpypi) server. In practice, using testpypi is painful, and the hints on the pypi front page don’t give enough details about how to do it. This post is my log of how I get testpypi working for me. This post will walk you through getting your new module up on testpypi and making sure it works right before you post it to the world+cat on Python Package Index (pypi).

setup.py

This post is assuming you already have an awesome setup.py file, and already know how to build a basic package using distribute, or setup_tools. . That work is already covered by some tutorials. Read those guide first if you need an setup.py intro, and come back here when you are done.

Please use distribute

Welcome back. Ok, I lied. I would like to suggest one change to your setup.py file. My request is to ask you to kindly please use distribute_setup. its the new hotsauce,

from distribute_setup import use_setuptools
use_setuptools()

That will use the newer distrbute tool to setup your project.

Register a username on pypi and testpyp

Register for a username and package name at testpypi. I suggest you also grab a matching user name at the main pypi site as well. You will need one of these to log in and update projects you want to post.

Manually create your config file

In theory running python setup.py register will create a proper config file for setup. This failed for me many times, especially when trying to use some -r options to post to testpypi. Instead it’s eaiser to manually create a .pypirc configurat file. On Mac/Linux, it lives at ~/.pypirc If you know where it lives on Windows, please leave a comment. To use testpypi you mostly need to define it as an index server. For speed you can just use the config below, which defines the main pypi server as well as the test server. Edit it to use your own username instead of ‘yourlogin‘.

[distutils]
index-servers =
pypi
pypitest

[pypitest]
repository: http://testpypi.python.org/pypi
username:yourlogin


You can also add to each index server a line containing password:yourpassword. That is, if you believe passwords in plaintext files are a good thing!

Register your module name

Almost there. You can now run setup.py commands with the remote option specifying a index server named in your config file. For example adding -r pypitest. Note that you have to put the -r option after each command which contacts a server in the params chain. It’s annoying, but that is what it takes. You can now just register your project with pypitest by running.

python setup.py sdist # create your distribution
python setup.py sdist -r pypitest #register your package name


Upload your module

Now, you can (finally) upload your module to the testpypi server. In the example the command line to do that would be:
python setup.py upload -r pypitest
Of course, once you have done it step-by-step to sort our errors, you can do an all at once command of
python setup.py register -r pypitest sdist upload -r pypitest

Test downloading your module

Module uploaded successfully? No errors, failures, insanities and it shows up on? Can you see it in the list of available testpypi packages? Gratz! But you can’t go home yet. You need to test installing the module from the index server.

The best way to test is to fire up a virtualenv to download your test module into. This will isolate it from messing up your system if something is broken. If you need to learn to use virtualenv, read this virtualenv tutorial and then come back. Once your virtualenv is running. just run pip with the ‘-i testpypi’ options to grab your test package from the testpypi. The command for that (in this example for pypeople) looks like:

pip install --verbose --index-url http://testpypi.python.org/pypi/ pypeople

If you are testing several times in a row, you will need to add –upgrade to trigger a force re-install. Otherwise install will only re-install for a major version number change.
pip install --verbose --upgrade --index-url http://testpypi.python.org/pypi/ pypeople

Success!

Finally, bugs are squashed, and your virtualenv install work. Gratz! You have tested posting your project as a module, and you have tested downloading your module. Now it’s time to push it over to pypi, and post it for the world to see/share.

If you want to read more, check out this Great post at foobar.lu.

Tags: install, pypi, testpypi, virtualenv