Adding command line scripts to your python package

Command line scripts inside python packages are common. You can organise your package in such a way that when a user installs the package, the script will be available on their path.

If you had the greetings package which had the command line script hello_world.py.

greetings/
   greetings/
   init.py
   hello_world.py

You could run that script by running:

python greetings/greetings/hello_world.py

However if you would like to run it like so:

hello_world.py

You can achieve this by adding scripts to your setup() in setup.py like this:

from setuptools import setup
setup(
  name='greetings',
  scripts=['hello_world.py']
)

When you install the greetings package now, hello_world.py will be added to your path.

Another possibility would be to add an entry point:

entry_points={'console_scripts': ['greetings=greetings.hello_world:main']}

This way you just have to run it like:

greetings