pystraps is a simple Paste create script which creates a Python package skeleton aiming convenience for Python developers.

To bootstrap a Python package, you may use following instructions.

The easiest way to manage your virtual environments is to use the virtualenvwrapper package available on Debian GNU/Linux based distributions through the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install virtualenvwrapper

Create a virtual environment (regardless of the present working directory):

$ mkvirtualenv --no-site-packages zama

To install pystraps, issue the following command:

$ pip install https://github.com/vst/pystraps/tarball/master

Assuming that your Python package is called zingo, issue the following command and answer the questions. You may simply hit enter to leave them unanswered. Unanswered questions will be marked as TODO in package source files which you can alter at anytime later:

$ paster create -t pystraps zingo

This command will create the following layout:

$ tree zingo
zingo
├── docs
│   ├── make.bat
│   ├── Makefile
│   └── source
│       ├── conf.py
│       ├── index.rst
│       ├── _static
│       │   └── README
│       └── _templates
│           └── README
├── _gitignore
├── LICENSE.txt
├── README.rst
├── setup.py
├── zingo
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __init__.pyc
│   ├── scripts
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   └── packageinfo.py
│   └── tests
│       ├── __init__.py
│       └── packageinfo.py
└── zingo.egg-info
    ├── dependency_links.txt
    ├── entry_points.txt
    ├── not-zip-safe
    ├── PKG-INFO
    ├── requires.txt
    ├── SOURCES.txt
    └── top_level.txt

8 directories, 23 files

Note that, in case that you use git, the zingo/_gitignore will not function unless the file is renamed to .gitignore:

$ mv zingo/_gitignore zingo/.gitignore

For development purposes you can install your package with:

$ pip install -e ./zingo

Additionally, ./zingo/development.pip includes some Python development tools such as Sphinx, pep8 and coverage. To install them:

$ pip install -r ./zingo/development.pip

To distribute your package, you can issue the command:

$ python setup.py sdist

There is a sample test case generated for you. To run it:

$ python -m "zingo.tests.packageinfo"

Apart from the test case, there is also a sample script which is installed while installing the package: zingo-packageinfo. This script provides a short version (as plain text) and a long version (both as plain text and HTML) of zingo's package information:

$ zingo-packageinfo shorter
$ zingo-packageinfo longer -f txt
$ zingo-packageinfo longer -f html

To edit and generate the documentation, simply go to the docs folder:

$ cd zingo/docs

The documentation is Sphinx-ready. To generate the HTML documentation:

$ make html