setup.py build doesn't work but develop does

Question

I have a simple python package that's importable without issue when running:

python setup.py develop

but not when running

python setup.py install

No error occurs* when running install but I get a no module named... error when I attempt to import it even though I can see the package when I run pip list . I only have python 2.7 installed, I'm not using virtualenv, so I don't understand why develop works but install doesn't.

(additionally running build then install also fails)

---

No error but a *warning I couldn't find details about...

---

Listed but importing will fail

---

Answer 1

Posting about this since it affected me. The important thing to know is that distutils which builds the package builds it even though it has broken dependencies , see here . If you watch the output when you run python setup.py install you will probably identify the source of the problem.

For me, I had a package called "whatever" with a full name that was very clear what it was, but is annoying to type. So I wanted the command itself to be an abbreviation, like "we".

Orginally, my setup.py looked like this:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='we',
    version='3.0.3',
    py_modules=['we'],
    install_requires=[
        ...
    ],
    scripts=['whatever/bin/we']
)

Where my folder structure was like this:

├── setup.py
├── whatever
│   ├── bin/
│   │   ├── we
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── other_stuff/

and inside we , I import the full package (that has a click interface):

#!/usr/bin/env python

from whatever.cli import cli
cli()

When I ran the install I saw this:

$ python setup.py install
running install
running bdist_egg
running egg_info
writing we.egg-info/PKG-INFO
writing dependency_links to we.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
writing requirements to we.egg-info/requires.txt
writing top-level names to we.egg-info/top_level.txt
file we.py (for module we) not found
reading manifest file 'we.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
writing manifest file 'we.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
installing library code to build/bdist.macosx-10.13-x86_64/egg
running install_lib
running build_py
file we.py (for module we) not found
file we.py (for module we) not found
warning: build_py: byte-compiling is disabled, skipping.
...

The problem was that there was no module named we, only the cli tool. Removing the py_modules line and replacing it with packages pointing the full package folder name solved it for me:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='we',
    version='3.0.3',
    packages=['whatever'],
    install_requires=[
        ...
    ],
    scripts=['whatever/bin/we']
)

Now when I run we , the whatever cli package executes. Hope this helps any future readers.