Questions tagged [setuptools]

setuptools is a (largely) drop-in replacement for distutils first published in 2004. Its most notable addition over the unmodified distutils tools was the ability to declare dependencies on other packages. It is currently recommended as a more regularly updated alternative to distutils that offers consistent support for more recent packaging standards across a wide range of Python versions.

The recommended pip installer runs all setup.py scripts with setuptools, even if the script itself only imports distutils.
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Tag usage

• Questions about setuptools-specific features should be tagged setuptools.
• If a question is only about functionality common to both distutils and setuptools, the distutils tag can be used in advance.
• If it's unclear that the question author is using setuptools, the distutils tag should be used instead.

Other related tags: packaging setup.py pyproject.toml twine cython

Modern alternatives to setuptools

• Flit
• Hatch
• Poetry

Resources

• setuptools documentation
• Python Packaging User Guide