The Python Package Index (PyPI) not only stores the package info, but also the package data if the author of the package wishes to. The distutils command :command:`upload` pushes the distribution files to PyPI.
The command is invoked immediately after building one or more distribution files. For example, the command
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload
will cause the source distribution and the Windows installer to be uploaded to PyPI. Note that these will be uploaded even if they are built using an earlier invocation of :file:`setup.py`, but that only distributions named on the command line for the invocation including the :command:`upload` command are uploaded.
The :command:`upload` command uses the username, password, and repository URL from the :file:`$HOME/.pypirc` file (see section :ref:`pypirc` for more on this file). If a :command:`register` command was previously called in the same command, and if the password was entered in the prompt, :command:`upload` will reuse the entered password. This is useful if you do not want to store a clear text password in the :file:`$HOME/.pypirc` file.
You can specify another PyPI server with the :option:`--repository=*url*` option:
python setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload -r http://example.com/pypi
See section :ref:`pypirc` for more on defining several servers.
You can use the :option:`--sign` option to tell :command:`upload` to sign each uploaded file using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). The :program:`gpg` program must be available for execution on the system :envvar:`PATH`. You can also specify which key to use for signing using the :option:`--identity=*name*` option.
Other :command:`upload` options include :option:`--repository=<url>` or :option:`--repository=<section>` where url is the url of the server and section the name of the section in :file:`$HOME/.pypirc`, and :option:`--show-response` (which displays the full response text from the PyPI server for help in debugging upload problems).
The long_description field plays a special role at PyPI. It is used by
the server to display a home page for the registered package.
If you use the reStructuredText syntax for this field, PyPI will parse it and display an HTML output for the package home page.
The long_description field can be attached to a text file located
in the package:
from distutils.core import setup
setup(name='Distutils',
long_description=open('README.txt'))
In that case, README.txt is a regular reStructuredText text file located in the root of the package besides setup.py.
To prevent registering broken reStructuredText content, you can use the
:program:`rst2html` program that is provided by the docutils package
and check the long_description from the command line:
$ python setup.py --long-description | rst2html.py > output.html
docutils will display a warning if there's something wrong with your syntax.