Adding Non-Code Files

Often packages will need to depend on files which are not .py files: e.g. images, data tables, documentation, etc. Those files need special treatment in order for setuptools to handle them correctly.

The mechanism that provides this is the MANIFEST.in file. This is relatively quite simple: MANIFEST.in is really just a list of relative file paths specifying files or globs to include.:

include README.rst
include docs/*.txt
include funniest/data.json

In order for these files to be copied at install time to the package’s folder inside site-packages, you’ll need to supply include_package_data=True to the setup() function.

Note

Files which are to be used by your installed library (e.g. data files to support a particular computation method) should usually be placed inside of the Python module directory itself. E.g. in our case, a data file might be at funniest/funniest/data.json. That way, code which loads those files can easily specify a relative path from the consuming module’s __file__ variable.