Copy an entire folder in a setup.py file

Question

I have a python application (mainly done using pyqt). I am using py2exe to create the executable, my setup.py looks like this

from distutils.core import setup import py2exe import os 
includes=["sqlite3","sip","PyQt4","PyQt4.QtGui","PyQt4.QtCore"]
excludes=[] 
packages=[] 
dll_excludes=['libgdk-win32-1.0-0.dll', 'libgobject-2.0-0.dll', 'tcl84.dll', 'tk84.dll']

setup(

      options={"py2exe": {"compressed": 2,
                          "optimize": 2,
                          "includes": includes,
                          "excludes": excludes,
                          "packages": packages,
                          "dll_excludes": dll_excludes,
                          "bundle_files": 2,
                          "dist_dir": "dist",
                          "xref": False,
                          "skip_archive": False,
                          "ascii": False,
                          "custom_boot_script": '',
                          }
               },
      windows=['myapplication.py'],
      data_files = [('', [r'c:\configuration.ini',
                          r'c:readme.txt'
                          ])]

      )

Now the data_files entry allows me to copy a few files to the 'dist' folder, however I would also like to copy my documentation folder, the documentation folder includes a whole bunch of files, html,images,pdfs, about 2MB of documentation stored in a my_app\docs folder. I am not sure how to do this. Can anyone suggest how?

Answer 1

You're going to have to use a custom function to do this as part of your setup.py:

def copy_dir():
    dir_path = 'YOUR_DIR_HERE'
    base_dir = os.path.join('MODULE_DIR_HERE', dir_path)
    for (dirpath, dirnames, files) in os.walk(base_dir):
        for f in files:
            yield os.path.join(dirpath.split('/', 1)[1], f)

Then I set this as my package_data:

package_data = {
    '' : [f for f in copy_dir()]
},

Note that this should also work if you're using data_files. Make sure that you call the function as part of a list comprehension - apparently setuptools doesn't play nice with list-alikes instead of straight up lists.