download nltk corpus as cmdclass in setup.py files not working

Question

There are some parts of the nltk corpus that I'd like to add to the setup.py file. I followed the response here by setting up a custom cmdclass. My setup file looks like this.

from setuptools import setup
from setuptools.command.install import install as _install


class DownloadNLTK(install):
    def run(self):
        self.do_egg_install()
        import nltk
        nltk.download('wordnet')
        nltk.download('punkt')
        nltk.download('stopwords')
        nltk.download('vader_lexicon')

setup(
    install_requires=requirements,
    python_requires='>=3.7',
    cmdclass={'download_nltk': DownloadNLTK()}
)

However, running it, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 15, in <module>
    'install': DownloadNLTK()}
TypeError: __init__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'dist'

I tried to better understand what's needed, but I have to say that the documentation I found here on dist is not very clear to me. Can someone help with a solution approach? Thanks!

Answer 1

Pass the class, not its instance:

    cmdclass={'download_nltk': DownloadNLTK}

(no () to avoid instantiating the class)