Excluding a top-level directory from a setuptools package

Question

I\'m trying to put a Python project into a tarball using setuptools. The problem is that setuptools doesn\'t appear to like the way that the source tree was originally setu

Answer 1

I have the following in my setup.py...

setup(name='pyfoo',
      version="1.0.2",
      description='Example for stack overflow',
      url='http://stackoverflow.com/',
      author='David Michael Pennington',
      author_email='mike /|at|\ pennington.net',
      license='GPL',
      platforms='any',
      keywords='Stack Overflow Example',
      entry_points = "",
      long_description=read('README.rst'),
      include_package_data=True,  # Checks MANIFEST.in for explicit rules
      #                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      packages=find_packages(),
      use_2to3=True,
      zip_safe=False,
      setup_requires=["setuptools_hg"],

I had a doc/ directory that was getting massive due to the number of images I had in it; this meant that the size of my sdist was growing over 500kB. Originally I had this in my MANIFEST.in...

include LICENSE CHANGES README.rst requirements.txt
recursive-exclude * __pycache__
recursive-exclude * *.pyc
recursive-exclude * *.pyo
recursive-exclude * *.orig

The only thing I had to do to exclude my doc directory was this line at the bottom of MANIFEST.in...

prune doc*

Using prune doc* suddenly removed all my doc/ directory from the sdist tarball. So, it looks like you just need to use this in a MANIFEST.in file...

prune tests*