How to make a python package?

If you are one of those python programmers, who are interested to implement things on one machine and use them on another machine without (or with minimal) changes, with no need to replicate the entire script in every system you work on and lastly when you want that your script to be available to almost everyone then this article might help you achieve you the above mentioned goals!

To demonstrate the process I am going make a simple scrapper that scraps the top most important news from https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-news and make a python package that returns the top news from the website with just few lines of code!

So let’s get started…

First lets make the scrapper. To do that we will first get sorted with the libraries.

Importing libraries for scrapping & defining soup to parse the html page

So now the soup is defined let’s make the class with the scrapper function,

Defining a class wnews & function news to scrap all the important world new

Checking whether the scrapper is working or not,

So we have the news!

Now let’s just get sorted with all the directories. Based on what I did, we first make a folder with name of the package and inside that we make another folder with the name of the package. The inner folder holds all the codes and matter that the package is suppose to do. and the outermost folder consists of the setup file. (Will explain the setup file in a while.)

These bunch of codes will get us the desired directory structure

Before we move on, lets just save the code that we made above in a .py format

This is quite a time consuming stuff, prefer using the commented method for the job.

Now comes the init function. This function is present in every package and this function is called when the package is initialized. This function is declared implicitly, and execution happens in the order they are created.

Since we just need one function from one class one line of code does the job.

So, lets move on to the setup.py file. This is a python file that will consist of all the package metadata information.

The setup.py file

Here is a table from https://dzone.com/articles/executable-package-pip-install which explains some parameters from the above setup.py code.

As we are done with the setup.py file, we will go back to the inner folder with the package name so that we can make DIST folder. DIST is nothing but “distribution”, the compiled code/library, also named public/ or build/. The files meant for production or public use are usually located here.

Building the Dist file with the configurations mentioned in the setup.py

Now that we have the dist file lets upload it to the PyPI using twine. Twine is a utility for publishing Python packages on PyPI. To use it, first we install it,

Now comes the final part of the tutorial i.e. uploading the files to PyPI. This step requires you to log in to your PyPI account so do that with correct credentials.

This step also gives the link where we can have a look at our package on PyPI

To get the exact overview of how the directory will look, here is the glimpse,

So, we have successfully made our package using these simple steps.

Here is a view from PyPI website:

Now lets test our package,

So its working!

To conclude, we learned how to make a python package using very simple steps. I hope you liked it.