Python setup.py: How to get find_packages() to identify packages in subdirectories

I'm trying to create a setup.py file where find_packages() recursively finds packages. In this example, foo, bar, and baz are all modules that I want to be installed and available on the python path. For example, I want to be able to do import foo, bar, baz. The bar-pack and foo-pack are just regular non-python directories that will contain various support files/dirs (such as tests, READMEs, etc. specific to the respective module).

├── bar-pack │   └── bar │   └── __init__.py ├── baz │   └── __init__.py ├── foo-pack │   └── foo │   └── __init__.py ├── setup.py 

Then say that setup.py is as follows:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages setup( name="mypackage", version="0.1", packages=find_packages(), ) 

However, when I run python setup.py install or python setup.py sdist, only the baz directory is identified and packaged.

I can simplify it down further, and run the following command, but again, only baz is identified.

python -c "from setuptools import setup, find_packages; print(find_packages())" ['baz'] 

Do you know how I might extend the search path (or manually hard-code the search path) of the find_packages()?

Any help is appreciated.

1 Answer

This is like using the src-layout for the "foo" and "bar" packages, but the flat layout for "baz". It's possible, but requires some custom configuration in the setup.py.

Setuptools' find_packages supports a "where" keyword (docs), you can use that.

setup( ... packages=( find_packages() + find_packages(where="./bar-pack") + find_packages(where="./foo-pack") ), ... ) 

Since find_packages returns a plain old list, you could also just list your packages manually, and that's arguably easier / less magical.

setup( ... packages=["baz", "bar", "foo"], ... ) 

The non-standard directory structure means you'll also want to specify the package_dir structure for distutils, which describes where to put the installed package(s).

Piecing it all together:

setup( name="mypackage", version="0.1", packages=["baz", "bar", "foo"], package_dir={ "": ".", "bar": "./bar-pack/bar", "foo": "./foo-pack/foo", }, ) 

The above installer will create this directory structure in site-packages:

.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages ├── bar │   ├── __init__.py │   └── __pycache__ │   └── __init__.cpython-39.pyc ├── baz │   ├── __init__.py │   └── __pycache__ │   └── __init__.cpython-39.pyc ├── foo │   ├── __init__.py │   └── __pycache__ │   └── __init__.cpython-39.pyc └── mypackage-0.1.dist-info ├── INSTALLER ├── METADATA ├── RECORD ├── REQUESTED ├── WHEEL ├── direct_url.json └── top_level.txt