Uploading to pypi (or custom servers)

When the (full)release command tries to upload your package to a pypi server, zest.releaser basically just executes the command python setup.py register sdist --formats=zip upload.

For safety reasons zest.releaser will only offer to upload your package to http://pypi.python.org when the package is already registered there. If this is not the case yet, you get a confirmation question whether you want to create a new package.

If the setup.py register ... command fails, you probably need to configure your PyPI configuration file. And of course you need to have setuptools/distribute installed.

PyPI configuration file (~/.pypirc)

For uploads to PyPI to work you will need a .pypirc file in your home directory that has your pypi login credentials, like this:

[server-login]
username:maurits
password:secret

Uploading to other servers

Since python 2.6 (or in earlier python versions, with collective.dist) you can specify multiple indexes for uploading your package in your .pypirc:

[distutils]
index-servers =
  pypi
  local

[pypi]
#pypi.python.org
username:maurits
password:secret

[local]
repository:http://localhost:8080/test/products/
username:maurits
password:secret
# You may need to specify the realm, which is the domain the
# server sends back when you do a challenge:
#realm:Zope

See http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.dist for more info.

When all this is configured correctly, zest.releaser will first register and upload at the official pypi (if the package is registered there already). Then it will offer to upload to the other index servers that you have specified in .pypirc.

Note that since version 3.15, zest.releaser also looks for this information in the setup.cfg if your package has that file. One way to use this, is to restrict the servers that zest.releaser will ask you upload to. If you have defined 40 index-servers in your pypirc but you have the following in your setup.cfg, you will not be asked to upload to any server:

[distutils]
index-servers =

Note that after creating the tag we still ask you if you want to checkout that tag for tweaks or pypi/distutils server upload. We could add some extra checks to see if that is really needed, but someone who does not have index-servers listed, may still want to use an entry point like gocept.zestreleaser.customupload to do uploading, or do some manual steps first before uploading.

Some people will hardly ever want to do a release on PyPI but in 99 out of 100 cases only want to create a tag. They won’t like the default answer of ‘yes’ to that question of whether to create a checkout of the tag. So since version 3.16 you can influence this default answer. You can add some lines to the .pypirc file in your home directory to change the default answer for all packages, or change it for individual packages in their setup.cfg file. The lines are this:

[zest.releaser]
release = no

You can use no/false/off/0 or yes/true/on/1 as answers; upper, lower or mixed case are all fine.

Including all files in your release

By default, only the Python files and a README.txt are included (by setuptools) when you make a release. So you miss out on your changelog, json files, stylesheets and so on. There are two strategies to include those other files:

• Add a MANIFEST.in file in the same directory as your setup.py that lists the files you want to include. Don’t worry, wildcards are allowed. Actually, zest.releaser will suggest a sample MANIFEST.in for you if you don’t already have it. The default is often good enough.
• Setuptools can detect which files are included in your version control system (svn, git, etc.) which it’ll then automatically include.

The last approch has a problem: not every version control system is supported out of the box. So you might need to install extra packages to get it to work. So: use a MANIFEST.in file to spare you the trouble. If not, here are some extra packages:

• setuptools-git (Setuptools plugin for finding files under Git version control)
• setuptools_hg (Setuptools plugin for finding files under Mercurial version control)
• setuptools_bzr (Setuptools plugin for finding files under Bazaar version control)
• collective.dist (when using python2.4, depending on your ~/.pypirc file)
• setuptools_subversion (Setuptools plugin for finding files under Subversion version control.) You probably need this when you upgrade to the recent subversion 1.7. If you suddenly start missing files in the sdists you upload to PyPI you definitely need it. Alternatively: set up a proper MANIFEST.in as that method works with any version control system.

In general, if you are missing files in the uploaded package, the best is to put a proper MANIFEST.in file next to your setup.py. See zest.pocompile for an example.

Running automatically without input

Sometimes you want to run zest.releaser without hitting <enter> all the time. You might want to run zest.releaser from your automatic test environment, for instance. For that, there’s the --no-input commandline option. Pass that and all defaults will be accepted automatically.

This means your version number and so must be OK. If you want to have a different version number from the one in your setup.py, you’ll need to change it yourself by hand. And the next version number will be chosen automatically, too. So 1.2 will become 1.3. This won’t detect that you might want to do a 1.3 after a 1.2.1 bugfix release, but we cannot perform feats of magic in zest.releaser :-)

In case you always want to accept the defaults, a setting in your setup.cfg is available:

[zest.releaser]
no-input = true

An important reminder: if you want to make sure you never upload anything automatically to the python package index, include the release = no setting in setup.cfg:

[zest.releaser]
no-input = true
release = no