This project provides a Python package, astropy_helpers, which includes many build, installation, and documentation-related tools used by the Astropy project, but packaged separately for use by other projects that wish to leverage this work. The motivation behind this package and details of its implementation are in the accepted Astropy Proposal for Enhancement (APE) 4.

astropy_helpers includes a special "bootstrap" module called ah_bootstrap.py which is intended to be used by a project's setup.py in order to ensure that the astropy_helpers package is available for build/installation. This is similar to the ez_setup.py module that is shipped with some projects to bootstrap setuptools.

As described in APE4, the version numbers for astropy_helpers follow the corresponding major/minor version of the astropy core package, but with an independent sequence of micro (bugfix) version numbers. Hence, the initial release is 0.4, in parallel with Astropy v0.4, which will be the first version of Astropy to use astropy-helpers.

For examples of how to implement astropy-helpers in a project, see the setup.py and setup.cfg files of the Affiliated package template.