How to deal with a script which has shebang line in setup script?

Question

I have the following structure of my distribution source:

|project
    |setup.py
    |project.py
    |package
        |__init__.py
        |code.py

project.py is the main script and it has shebang line.

Should I define somehow the above mentioned fact in setup.py?

Answer 1

You'll want to look at the setuptools console_scripts entry point.

Say your project.py currently contains something like this:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run_proj()

You need to move first move project.py inside the package directory to be able to reference it from setup.py. Then, register the run_proj function with the console_scripts entry point like this:

setup.py

setup(
    # other arguments here...
    entry_points={
        'console_scripts': [
            'run-proj = package.project:run_proj',
        ],
    }
)

After that, you'll need to re-run setup.py, for example by doing python setup.py develop, or whichever method you're using during development.

Then you'll get a bin/run-proj script that calls run_proj(), and can be called from the command line. (If you install the package in a virtual env, that will be in venv/bin/run-proj, or if you install it system-wide, somewhere like usr/local/bin/run-proj, depending on your OS / distro).

That script should actually be on your path, so you should be able to just run run-proj from the shell.

At this point, the shebang line isn't really necessary any more, and you can remove it (the bin/run-proj will have an automatically generated shebang pointing to the proper Python interpreter).