Distributing a binary utility in setuptools

Question

I have a command-line program (`foo`) written in an esoteric programming language. I'd like to distribute this program as part of an existing python package that uses setuptools. `foo` should appear in the user's path and be executable from the command line, much like the behavior of distutil's scripts or setuptools' entry_points. It's feasible for me to cross-compile the program for every platform and then build a different egg for each platform with a platform-specific binary of `foo`. The problem is, I don't know how to convince setuptools to copy the binary to a platform-appropriate place on the target system. For example, I tried using the `scripts` directive: ``` setup( ... scripts=["foo"] ... ) ``` but it appears setuptools doesn't like a "script" with non-utf8 data. ``` UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xcf in position 0: invalid continuation byte ``` I could declare it as a resource, but that wouldn't put it in the user's path. How do I ship a binary comman…

Accepted Answer

My solution was as follows:

- Create a wrapper module `foowrapper`.

- `foowrapper` contains `foo` (but renamed to `foo_bin`) and a new script called `foo`, contents below:

.

```
 #!python
 file = __file__
 import os.path
 cmd = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),"foo_bin")
 import subprocess
 subprocess.call([cmd] + sys.argv[1:])
```

- Update setup.py to contain foowrapper, foo, and foo_bin

.

```
setup(
  ...
  package_data={
    'foowrapper':['foo_bin']
  },
  packages=['foowrapper],
  scripts=['foowrapper/foo']
  ...
)
```

Distributing a binary utility in setuptools

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