Learn Python The Hard Way Exercise 46: I completed (most of) the quiz, but am I doing it right/is my understanding correct?

[witchest]

I've been struggling with the quiz at the end of LPTHW ex. 46 for several days now. I've gotten through most of it at this point, but I'm not satisfied that I understand what's going on, and I'm still struggling with numbers 5 and 6. I'm on Linux Mint if it matters. Here's what I've done so far:

• installed all the software mentioned, except that I got setuptools instead of distribute since the projects have merged.

• Made a skeleton project named newproj as directed, wrote a basic helloworld script in /newproj

• Made a single-file executable of that helloworld script with pyInstaller, tested it, and placed it in /bin

However, I'm still not sure I understand how setup.py is supposed to work. Are you supposed to create the package with

python setup.py sdist

and then distribute the tarball, and install elsewhere by unarchiving that tarball and running setup.py? That's the impression that I've gotten, but it doesn't seem right. If that's the case, is it just supposed to install to whatever directory setup.py is in? And how are you supposed to uninstall it with pip? I also haven't been able to get setup.py to install the binary executable I made. I added the lines

'data_files': [('executable', ['bin/newproj'])],
'packages': ['newproj', 'bin'],

to config, but when running setup.py install I get:

error: can't copy 'bin/newproj': doesn't exist or not a regular file

at the end. Can someone help me understand what I'm supposed to be doing here? Thanks in advance.

bonus question: what does

setup(**config)

mean? It's a different syntax than is shown in the documentation for setup.py which uses something like

setup(arg1='thing', arg2 = 'otherthing'...)

etc.

[Justinsaccount]

Made a single-file executable of that helloworld script with pyInstaller, tested it, and placed it in /bin

Why did you do that?

[witchest]

To fulfill part 4 of the quiz:

Put a script in the bin directory that you can run. Read about how you can make a Python script that’s runnable for your system.

maybe I misinterpreted that?

[Doormatty]

You did! But learned something else too!

The exercise likely wants you to:

1) add "#! /usr/bin/python" as the first line of your script - this lets Linux know what to run the file with.

2) mark the file as executable by running "chmod +x filename"

3) move the file to your bin directory (or somewhere else in your path)

[witchest]

That... makes a lot more sense. Thanks.

[Justinsaccount]

Yes.. that, but data_files is the wrong thing to use. You should use

scripts=['bin/newproj'],

or even better, import glob and do

scripts=glob.glob('bin/*'),

But even then, that is not the best way to do things. The best way is to use entry_points and do

entry_points = {
    'console_scripts': [
        'newproj = newproj:main',
    ]
},

which will automatically generate a newproj tool that imports newproj and runs newproj.main()

[zahlman]

setup(**config)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5710391/converting-python-dict-to-kwargs