How to make PyPi description Markdown work?

I uploaded a package to PyPi using:

python setup.py register -r pypi
python setup.py sdist upload -r pypi

I'm trying to modify the description, I wrote (please don't edit the formatting of the following piece of code, I made it on purpose to demonstrate my problem):

**my plugin**

This plugin enables you to ... For example:
```python
@attr(section='MySection', id=1)
def test_function(self):
    """
    Bla bla bla
    """
    pass
```

However, the text appears as it is, without the markdown formatting. What am I doing wrong?

Solution

As of March 16, 2018, PyPI.org aka Warehouse (finally) supports Markdown in long descriptions. Warehouse replaced the old legacy PyPI implementation in April 2018.

You need to:

Make sure setuptools is upgraded to version 38.6.0 or newer
Make sure twine is upgraded to version 1.11.0 or newer
Make sure wheel is upgraded to version 0.31.0 or newer
Add a new field named long_description_content_type to your setup() call, and set it to 'text/markdown':
```
setup(
    long_description="""# Markdown supported!\n\n* Cheer\n* Celebrate\n""",
    long_description_content_type='text/markdown',
    # ....
)
```
See PEP 566 - Metadata for Python Software Packages 2.1.

Use twine to upload your distributions to PyPI:

$ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel   # adjust as needed
$ twine upload dist/*

The old legacy PyPI infrastructure would not render Markdown, only the new Warehouse infrastructure does. The legacy infrastructure is now gone (as of 2018-04-30).

Currently, PyPI uses cmarkgfm as the markdown renderer, via the readme_renderer library (using readme_renderer.markdown.render(long_description) to produce HTML output). This means that your markdown documents will render exactly the same as on GitHub; it is essentially the same renderer.

You can validate your package long_description with the twine check command (twine 1.12.0 or newer).

The old < 2018-03-16 answer follows below.

Note: this is the old, now outdated answer, as of 2018-03-16 Markdown is supported provided you use the right tools, see above.

PyPI does not support Markdown, so your README will not be rendered into HTML.

If you want a rendered README, stick with reStructuredText; the Sphinx introduction to reStructuredText is a good starting point.

You probably want to install the docutils package so you can test your document locally; you want to run the included rst2html.py script on your README to see what errors are produced, if any. Your specific sample has too many errors:

$ bin/rst2html.py test.rst  > /tmp/test.html
test.rst:7: (ERROR/3) Unexpected indentation.
test.rst:3: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.
test.rst:3: (WARNING/2) Inline interpreted text or phrase reference start-string without end-string.
test.rst:11: (WARNING/2) Block quote ends without a blank line; unexpected unindent.
test.rst:11: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.
test.rst:11: (WARNING/2) Inline interpreted text or phrase reference start-string without end-string.

Your code block is using Github's Markdown extensions, which are entirely wrong for reStructuredText. You could use a reST code block (probably, if the PyPI version of docutils is new enough):

.. code-block:: python

    @attr(section='MySection', type='functional+', module='MyModule', id=1)
    def test_function(self):
        """
        This is the original docstring
        """
        pass

To test this locally you'll need to install Pygments as well.

There is a feature request with pull request to add support for Markdown, if you are interested.