Best practices for making a PyPI package (including automatic building, 2023)
I created a bunch of commandline programs in Python to help me with machine learning tasks. Last week I got so annoyed that every time I changed or extended a program, I had to also update the commandline interface for it, that I decided to do something about it. And so clargs was born, a package that takes a function, inspects it’s signature, and creates the correct commandline interface through Python’s argparse.
This post is not about this particular package, but about the lessons I learned how to create a package. It’s the latest and greatest and best practices in July 2023. This includes setting up testing (with tox and unittest), setting up GitHub actions (both so that every commit gets tested, and that a new version gets built and pushed to PyPI whenever I tag a new release). It even solves the problem that I want to have one and only one place where I specify the version number!