Migration from setup.py to pyproject.toml: how to specify package name?

Question

I’m currently trying to move our internal projects away from setup.py to pyproject.toml (PEP-518). I’d like to not use build backend specific configuration if possible, even though I do specify the backend in the [build-system] section by require‘ing it.

The pyproject.toml files are more or less straight-forward translations of the setup.py files, with the metadata set according to PEP-621, including the dependencies. We are using setuptools_scm for the determination of the version, therefore the version field ends up in the dynamic section.

We used to set the packages parameter to setup in our setup.py files, but I couldn’t find any corresponding field in pyproject.toml, so I simply omitted it.

When building the project using python3 -m build ., I end up with a package named UNKNOWN, even though I have the name field set in the [project] section. It seems that this breaks very early in the build:

$ python -m build .
* Creating virtualenv isolated environment...
* Installing packages in isolated environment... (setuptools, setuptools_scm[toml]>=6.2, wheel)
* Getting dependencies for sdist...
running egg_info
writing UNKNOWN.egg-info/PKG-INFO
....

I’m using python 3.8.11 and the following packages:

build==0.8.0
distlib==0.3.4
filelock==3.4.1
packaging==21.3
pep517==0.12.0
pip==22.0.4
platformdirs==2.4.0
pyparsing==3.0.9
setuptools==62.1.0
six==1.16.0
tomli==1.2.3
virtualenv==20.14.1
wheel==0.37.1

My (abbreviated) pyproject.toml looks like this:

[project]
name = "coolproject"
dependencies = [
   'pyyaml==5.3',
   'anytree==2.8.0',
   'pytest'
]
dynamic = [
   "version"
]

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools", "wheel", "setuptools_scm[toml]>=6.2"]

[tool.setuptools_scm]

Any ideas?

Asked By: arne

||

Source

Answer 1

On Debian/Ubuntu "UNKNOWN" packages can be created if an older system version of setuptools is installed as well.

Workaround:

sudo apt purge python3-setuptools

https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/3269

Answered By: chrism

Answer 2

Turning @AKX’s comments into an answer so that other people can find it more easily.

The problem may be an outdated pip/setuptools on the system. Apparently, version 19.3.1 which I have on my system cannot install a version of setuptools that can handle PEP621 metadata correctly.

You cannot require a new pip from within pyproject.toml using the build-system.requires directive.

In case you cannot update the system pip, you can always install on a per-user basis:

pip install --user pip

and you’re good to go.

Answered By: arne

Migration from setup.py to pyproject.toml: how to specify package name?

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