Entry points

The entry_points parameter is arguably the most useful feature of setuptools. It allows you to add hooks to many things within setuptools but the most useful two are the possibility to add both the command line and GUI commands and to extend the setuptools commands. The command line and GUI commands will even be converted to executables on Windows. The example in the first section already demonstrated both the features:

entry_points={
    'distutils.commands': [
        'command_name = your_package:YourClass',
    ],
    'console_scripts': [
        'spam = your_package:SpamClass',
    ],
},

This demonstration only shows how to call the functions but it doesn't show the actual functions.

Creating global commands

The first, a simple example, is nothing special at all; just a function that gets called as a regular main function where you need to specify sys.argv yourself (or better, use argparse). This is the setup.py file:

import setuptools...