How to distribute modules with python 3.4

Question

I've seen on Python Docs that distutils is "legacy" since Python 3.4. What is now the recommended (or standard) way to distribute packages and/or modules. Thanks

Answer 1

Well, the documentation for the distutils module says it all:

The distutils package provides support for building and installing additional modules into a Python installation. The new modules may be either 100%-pure Python, or may be extension modules written in C, or may be collections of Python packages which include modules coded in both Python and C.

Most Python users will not want to use this module directly, but instead use the cross-version tools maintained by the Python Packaging Authority. Refer to the Python Packaging User Guide for more information.

For the benefits of packaging tool authors and users seeking a deeper understanding of the details of the current packaging and distribution system, the legacy distutils based user documentation and API reference remain available:

• Installing Python Modules (Legacy version)
• Distributing Python Modules (Legacy version)

In particular inside the linked user guide they state:

• Use setuptools to define projects and create Source Distributions. [5] [6]
• Use the bdist_wheel setuptools extension available from the wheel project to create wheels. This is especially beneficial, if your project contains binary extensions. [7]
• Use twine for uploading distributions to PyPI.

And later on:

distribute was a fork of setuptools that was merged back into setuptools (in v0.7), thereby making setuptools the primary choice for Python packaging.

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In other words:

• distutils is still the standard way. Only, it's more low level than what most people want. It's the foundantion on top of which the other tools are built, so it is not "legacy". In fact there is no mention of deprecation in the docs.
• setuptools is the preferred way to distribute a package.

Answer 2

According to the Python Packaging User Guide it is recommended to use setuptools and then twine to create PyPi packages.