Packaging and Releases

Packaging

A pyproject.toml file has been created by the cookiecutter to allow your code to be packaged and installed by users. This file has been automatically set up with relevant meta information, dependencies (both core and optional dependencies for tests and documentaiton), and settings for additional features including versioningit for versioning your code. You can edit this file to alter and of this information as appropriate.

A MANIFEST.in file is also created to identify additional files included when packaging your code (e.g., additional comminity information like the Code of Conduct).

Includion of pyproject.toml should mean your code is installable from GitHub.

It is also a good idea to upload your package onto a package repository such as PyPI or conda-forge to make installation even easier for your users.

The PyPI documentation contains instructions for creating distributions for your package and how to add these to PyPI. The initial steps - creation of relevant files - have been handled for you by the cookiecutter. Once created, distribution files can also be used to add your package to conda-forge.

As you develop your package, you should package and release new versions of your code to give users access to the new features.

Versioning

Tagging is a good way to keep references to a specific version of your code that won’t change. This is especially useful when you want to a new a new code release. The cookiecutter uses versioningit to automatically determine your package’s version based on git tags.

By default, the initial version has been set to 0.0.0. You can install versioningit to check the current versioningit output from commandline:

$ cd <my_package_directory>
$ versioningit .
0.0.0

As you add commits, the versioning will automatically update with the commit hashes:

$ versioningit .
0.0.0+1.g58bcaff

To tag a version, use the following command:

git tag -a 0.1.0 -m "Version 0.1.0"

This will create a tag called 0.1.0 with the message “Version 0.1.0”. You can then push this tag to GitHub with git push origin --tags.

After creating a tag, you can check the versioning again:

$ versioningit .
0.1.0

Once the new tag has been pushed to GitHub, you can make a new release from this tag.

If using PyPI/Conda-forge, you should also upload the new releases here to these.