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 command-line utility as part of a python package?

• mwag: I've just answered this at stackoverflow.com/a/72946687/3160967

Answer 1

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']
 ...
)