Flit is a simple way to put Python packages and modules on PyPI.

$ python3 -m pip install flit

Flit requires Python 3 and therefore needs to be installed using the Python 3 version of pip.

Python 2 modules can be distributed using Flit, but need to be importable on Python 3 without errors.

Say you're writing a module foobar — either as a single file foobar.py, or as a directory — and you want to distribute it.

1. Make sure that foobar's docstring starts with a one-line summary of what the module is, and that it has a __version__:

   """An amazing sample package!"""
   
   __version__ = '0.1'

2. Install flit if you don't already have it:

   python3 -m pip install flit
   

3. Run flit init to create a pyproject.toml file. It will look something like this:

   [build-system]
   requires = ["flit"]
   build-backend = "flit.buildapi"
   
   [tool.flit.metadata]
   module = "foobar"
   author = "Sir Robin"
   author-email = "[email protected]"
   home-page = "https://github.com/sirrobin/foobar"

   You can edit this file to add other metadata, for example to set up command line scripts. See the pyproject.toml page of the documentation.

   If you have already got a flit.ini file to use with older versions of Flit, it will still work for now, but you should convert it to pyproject.toml when convenient.

4. Run this command to upload your code to PyPI:

   flit publish
   

To install a package locally for development, run:

flit install [--symlink] [--python path/to/python]

Flit packages a single importable module or package at a time, using the import name as the name on PyPI. All subpackages and data files within a package are included automatically.

To install the development version of Flit from Github:

git clone https://github.com/takluyver/flit.git
cd flit
python3 -m pip install docutils requests pytoml
python3 -m flit install

You may want to use the --symlink or --pth-file options so you can test changes without reinstalling it.

To run the tests, run py.test.