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Dependencies Management in Setuptools

There are three types of dependency styles offered by setuptools: 1) build system requirement, 2) required dependency and 3) optional dependency.

Note

Packages that are added to dependency can be optionally specified with the version by following PEP 440

Build system requirement

Package requirement

After organizing all the scripts and files and getting ready for packaging, there needs to be a way to tell Python what programs it needs to actually do the packaging (in our case, setuptools of course). Usually, you also need the wheel package as well since it is recommended that you upload a .whl file to PyPI alongside your .tar.gz file. Unlike the other two types of dependency keyword, this one is specified in your pyproject.toml file (if you have forgot what this is, go to quickstart or (WIP)):

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools"]
#...

Note

This used to be accomplished with the setup_requires keyword but is now considered deprecated in favor of the PEP 517 style described above. To peek into how this legacy keyword is used, consult our guide on deprecated practice (WIP) <../deprecated/index>

Declaring required dependency

This is where a package declares its core dependencies, without which it won't be able to run. setuptools supports automatically downloading and installing these dependencies when the package is installed. Although there is more finesse to it, let's start with a simple example.

setup.cfg

[options]
#...
install_requires =
    docutils
    BazSpam ==1.1

setup.py

setup(
    ...,
    install_requires=[
        'docutils',
        'BazSpam ==1.1',
    ],
)

pyproject.toml

[project]
# ...
dependencies = [
    "docutils",
    "BazSpam == 1.1",
]
# ...

When your project is installed (e.g. using pip), all of the dependencies not already installed will be located (via PyPI), downloaded, built (if necessary), and installed and 2) Any scripts in your project will be installed with wrappers that verify the availability of the specified dependencies at runtime.

Platform specific dependencies

Setuptools offers the capability to evaluate certain conditions before blindly installing everything listed in install_requires. This is great for platform specific dependencies. For example, the enum package was added in Python 3.4, therefore, package that depends on it can elect to install it only when the Python version is older than 3.4. To accomplish this

setup.cfg

[options]
#...
install_requires =
    enum34;python_version<'3.4'

setup.py

setup(
    ...,
    install_requires=[
        "enum34;python_version<'3.4'",
    ],
)

pyproject.toml

[project]
# ...
dependencies = [
    "enum34; python_version<'3.4'",
]
# ...

Similarly, if you also wish to declare pywin32 with a minimal version of 1.0 and only install it if the user is using a Windows operating system:

setup.cfg

[options]
#...
install_requires =
    enum34;python_version<'3.4'
    pywin32 >= 1.0;platform_system=='Windows'

setup.py

setup(
    ...,
    install_requires=[
        "enum34;python_version<'3.4'",
        "pywin32 >= 1.0;platform_system=='Windows'",
    ],
)

pyproject.toml

[project]
# ...
dependencies = [
    "enum34; python_version<'3.4'",
    "pywin32 >= 1.0; platform_system=='Windows'",
]
# ...

The environmental markers that may be used for testing platform types are detailed in PEP 508.

Dependencies that aren't in PyPI

Warning

Dependency links support has been dropped by pip starting with version 19.0 (released 2019-01-22).

If your project depends on packages that don't exist on PyPI, you may still be able to depend on them, as long as they are available for download as:

  • an egg, in the standard distutils sdist format,
  • a single .py file, or
  • a VCS repository (Subversion, Mercurial, or Git).

You just need to add some URLs to the dependency_links argument to setup().

The URLs must be either:

  1. direct download URLs,
  2. the URLs of web pages that contain direct download links, or
  3. the repository's URL

In general, it's better to link to web pages, because it is usually less complex to update a web page than to release a new version of your project. You can also use a SourceForge showfiles.php link in the case where a package you depend on is distributed via SourceForge.

If you depend on a package that's distributed as a single .py file, you must include an "#egg=project-version" suffix to the URL, to give a project name and version number. (Be sure to escape any dashes in the name or version by replacing them with underscores.) EasyInstall will recognize this suffix and automatically create a trivial setup.py to wrap the single .py file as an egg.

In the case of a VCS checkout, you should also append #egg=project-version in order to identify for what package that checkout should be used. You can append @REV to the URL's path (before the fragment) to specify a revision. Additionally, you can also force the VCS being used by prepending the URL with a certain prefix. Currently available are:

  • svn+URL for Subversion,
  • git+URL for Git, and
  • hg+URL for Mercurial

A more complete example would be:

vcs+proto://host/path@revision#egg=project-version

Be careful with the version. It should match the one inside the project files. If you want to disregard the version, you have to omit it both in the requires and in the URL's fragment.

This will do a checkout (or a clone, in Git and Mercurial parlance) to a temporary folder and run setup.py bdist_egg.

The dependency_links option takes the form of a list of URL strings. For example, this will cause a search of the specified page for eggs or source distributions, if the package's dependencies aren't already installed:

setup.cfg

[options]
#...
dependency_links = http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/

setup.py

setup(
    ...,
    dependency_links=[
        "http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/",
    ],
)

Optional dependencies

Setuptools allows you to declare dependencies that only get installed under specific circumstances. These dependencies are specified with the extras_require keyword and are only installed if another package depends on it (either directly or indirectly). This makes it convenient to declare dependencies for ancillary functions such as "tests" and "docs".

Note

tests_require is now deprecated

For example, Package-A offers optional PDF support and requires two other dependencies for it to work:

setup.cfg

[metadata]
name = Package-A

[options.extras_require]
PDF = ReportLab>=1.2; RXP

setup.py

setup(
    name="Project-A",
    ...,
    extras_require={
        "PDF": ["ReportLab>=1.2", "RXP"],
    },
)

pyproject.toml

# ...
[project.optional-dependencies]
PDF = ["ReportLab>=1.2", "RXP"]

The name PDF is an arbitrary identifier of such a list of dependencies, to which other components can refer and have them installed.

A use case for this approach is that other package can use this "extra" for their own dependencies. For example, if "Project-B" needs "project A" with PDF support installed, it might declare the dependency like this:

setup.cfg

[metadata]
name = Project-B
#...

[options]
#...
install_requires =
    Project-A[PDF]

setup.py

setup(
    name="Project-B",
    install_requires=["Project-A[PDF]"],
    ...,
)

pyproject.toml

[project]
name = "Project-B"
# ...
dependencies = [
    "Project-A[PDF]"
]

This will cause ReportLab to be installed along with project A, if project B is installed -- even if project A was already installed. In this way, a project can encapsulate groups of optional "downstream dependencies" under a feature name, so that packages that depend on it don't have to know what the downstream dependencies are. If a later version of Project A builds in PDF support and no longer needs ReportLab, or if it ends up needing other dependencies besides ReportLab in order to provide PDF support, Project B's setup information does not need to change, but the right packages will still be installed if needed.

Note

Best practice: if a project ends up no longer needing any other packages to support a feature, it should keep an empty requirements list for that feature in its extras_require argument, so that packages depending on that feature don't break (due to an invalid feature name).

Historically setuptools also used to support extra dependencies in console scripts, for example:

setup.cfg

[metadata]
name = Project A
#...

[options]
#...
entry_points=
    [console_scripts]
    rst2pdf = project_a.tools.pdfgen [PDF]
    rst2html = project_a.tools.htmlgen

setup.py

setup(
    name="Project-A",
    ...,
    entry_points={
        "console_scripts": [
            "rst2pdf = project_a.tools.pdfgen [PDF]",
            "rst2html = project_a.tools.htmlgen",
        ],
    },
)

This syntax indicates that the entry point (in this case a console script) is only valid when the PDF extra is installed. It is up to the installer to determine how to handle the situation where PDF was not indicated (e.g. omit the console script, provide a warning when attempting to load the entry point, assume the extras are present and let the implementation fail later).

Warning

pip and other tools might not support this use case for extra dependencies, therefore this practice is considered deprecated. See PyPUG:specifications/entry-points.

Python requirement

In some cases, you might need to specify the minimum required python version. This can be configured as shown in the example below.

setup.cfg

[metadata]
name = Project-B
#...

[options]
#...
python_requires = >=3.6

setup.py

setup(
    name="Project-B",
    python_requires=">=3.6",
    ...,
)

pyproject.toml

[project]
name = "Project-B"
requires-python = ">=3.6"
# ...