Python setuptools: distrobutions

Distrobutions are the files that you provide to users so that they can install your packages.
There are several different formats of distrobution, some target specific platforms, some come precompiled, etc.

distribution types

package format		description
sdist		source distrobutions are simply .tar.gz archives with all of the files configured in your setup() function. These are the standard packages that you find on pypi.
bdist_wheel		wheels are a new format for packages, and they are gradually replacing eggs as the standard. The advantages are: installing packages using C modules do not require a compiler on the user's computer they take less time to install
bdist_egg		package project as a zipfile (.egg). Explicitly add .egg to your PYTHONPATH and you may run it's contents.
bdist_zip		package project as a zipfile (.zip). Explicitly add .zip to your PYTHONPATH and you may run it's contents.
bdist_msi		windows specific installer (see also msi and python_msilib)
bdist_dmg		macos specific installer

Once configured, you can build a target distribution by adding it as a param on the commandline.
Here are some examples:

# sdist
python setup.py sdist
tar -xvf xxx.tar.gz && cd xxx* && python setup.py install

# wheel
python setup.py bdist_wheel
pip dist/*.whl

zipfile safe

By default, setup.py tries to conserve room by compressing files in zip/egg archives.
This may not always be safe or desirable. You can disable this behaviour with zip_files=False.

setuptools.setup(
    zip_files = False,
)