I finally got around to packaging up pg2cf and I am excited to see it out in the wild on pypi. Python packaging is pretty straightforward and this makes distribution of this tool much easier for us internally.

I could not have done it without this awesome python packaging guide.

Using setuptools also makes a lot of other things easier. For instance running tests is as simple as python setup.py test and installing the package locally can be done with python setup.py install. The main benifit of course is that now pg2cf is an executable so you once it is installed you can just run it.

The only “gotcha” that I ran into was that setuptools does not support markdown. Which makes it kind of weird since Markdown is now the standard for README and other documentation on GitHub.

I worked around this by using pandoc, this way I am able to convert my README.md to README.rst easily with pandoc README.md -o README.rst and then use that for PyPI.