3.3.10. Python Buildutils for local release management

Earlier today, I saw a question on Twitter asking "is there some setuptools extensions for uploading a sdist to a server over scp?" I responded with a "yes - we use buildutils' publish command for that."

Buildutils is a collection of useful extensions to Distutils. It hasn't been touched in a while, but it mostly works. It adds some commands like "stats", "pyflakes" (useful, but does not work with recent versions of PyFlakes), and "publish", which allows you to upload a release via SCP or SFTP.

The "publish" command is an extension that must be configured explicitly, so we do it in our 'setup.cfg'. We have a setup.cfg template that we use for all of our packages that uploads releases into one big directory. It looks like this:

; Enable the buildutils publish command
[global]
command_packages = buildutils.publish_command

; Set the destination of the publish command
[publish]
dist_dest = scp://@internalserver/path/to/releases/

; In one command, generate a distribution and checksum,
; upload them, and then clean out the build-related turds.
[aliases]
mkrelease = sdist checksum publish clean --all

We also use zc.buildout in-house, and I've been using that to ensure that I have Buildutils and setuptools-git (uses what's tracked by Git to generate the Manifest of files to include in the distribution package). In our buildout configs, I usually have a 'devtools' section that looks like this:

[devtools]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg:scripts
interpreter = py
eggs =
    current.package [test]
    buildutils
    setuptools-git

With the above, I get a 'bin/pbu' script that has the Buildutils and setuptools-git extensions installed. 'pbu' is a convenience command-line tool from Buildutils that is basically shorthand for 'python setup.py'. Using Buildout like this, I just ensure that the tools I need to generate and publish a distribution are available, no matter what machine I'm using. It's not needed, but I just find it convenient, particularly when other developers in our company need to generate a release from their machines and may not have remembered to install something like setuptools-git.