SHORT_DESCRIPTION

To build a new python package that is easily distributable, this template is provided. It contains the structure needed to make python packages easily installable with pip (the python package manager).

To create a new python package from this template simply copy all the files (including .gitignore) from this directory to your new python project path and change PACKAGE_NAME to a suitable package name. Besides renaming the folder and the occurences in this README, the name and some other info also has to be adjusted in setup.py.

Afterwards you should push a first commit to your gitlab repository. All python code that you write has to be inside the PACKAGE_NAME directory to be available for import later!

To make the contents of this package accessible in other python projects via import PACKAGE_NAME, a setup.py file is given. This allows the user to install the package with pip. For this open a terminal and move to the top level directory of this repository (the directory containing the setup.py file). Here run

pip install [--user] -e .

The -e stands for editable and causes pip to create a link to the current working directory in your pythonpath. This means all changes to the current working directory (either by manual changing of the module, or by git pull) are immeadiatly available for system wide import. For more information see the pip install reference and the Setuptools info page.