install Python module both as module and as script

Question

Say I wrote module foo.py.

I want the installation process to copy foo.py to prefix/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages so that it can be imported by other modules, but also to create a symbolic link named foo (not foo.py) in prefix/bin/ that points to foo.py.

How does one tell distutils to do that?

Answer 1

You can do this if you use setuptools entry_points. Here's an example:

foo.py

def main():
    print "Hello world"

setup.py

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="foo",
    version = "0.1",
    py_modules=['foo'],
    entry_points = {
        'console_scripts': ['foo = foo:main']
    }
)

Example usage, once the module has been installed using a tool like pip:

$ foo
Hello world
$ python -c 'import foo; foo.main()'
Hello world