The flit.ini config file

This file lives next to the module or package.

Note

Flit 0.12 and above uses a pyproject.toml file file to store this information. Run python3 -m flit.tomlify to convert a flit.ini file to pyproject.toml.

Metadata section

There are four required fields:

module

The name of the module/package, as you’d use in an import statement.

author

Your name

author-email

Your email address

home-page

A URL for the project, such as its Github repository.

e.g. for flit itself

[metadata]
module=flit
author=Thomas Kluyver
author-email=thomas@kluyver.me.uk
home-page=https://github.com/pypa/flit

The remaining fields are optional:

requires

A list of other packages from PyPI that this package needs. Each package should be on its own line, and may be followed by a version specifier in parentheses, like (>=4.1), and/or an environment marker after a semicolon. For example:

requires = requests (>=2.6)
      configparser; python_version == '2.7'
dev-requires

Packages that are required for development. This field is in the same format as requires.

These are not (yet) encoded in the wheel, but are used when doing flit install.

description-file

A path (relative to the .ini file) to a file containing a longer description of your package to show on PyPI. This should be written in reStructuredText, if your long description is not valid reStructuredText, a warning will be printed, and it will be interpreted as plain text on PyPI.

classifiers

A list of Trove classifiers, one per line, indented.

requires-python

A version specifier for the versions of Python this requires, e.g. ~=3.3 or >=3.3,<4 which are equivalents.

dist-name

If you want your package’s name on PyPI to be different from the importable module name, set this to the PyPI name.

keywords

Comma separated list of words to help with searching for your package.

license

The name of a license, if you’re using one for which there isn’t a Trove classifier. It’s recommended to use Trove classifiers instead of this in most cases.

maintainer, maintainer-email

Like author, for if you’ve taken over a project from someone else.

Here’s the full example from flit itself:

[metadata]
author=Thomas Kluyver
author-email=thomas@kluyver.me.uk
home-page=https://github.com/pypa/flit
requires=requests
requires-python= >=3
description-file=README.rst
classifiers=Intended Audience :: Developers
    License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License
    Programming Language :: Python :: 3
    Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules

Scripts section

Each key and value in this describes a shell command to be installed along with your package. These work like setuptools ‘entry points’. Here’s the section for flit:

[scripts]
flit = flit:main

This will create a flit command, which will call the function main() imported from flit.