How to include package data with setuptools/distutils?

Question

When using setuptools, I can not get the installer to pull in any package_data files. Everything I've read says that the following is the correct way to do it. Can someone please advise?

setup(
   name='myapp',
   packages=find_packages(),
   package_data={
      'myapp': ['data/*.txt'],
   },
   include_package_data=True,
   zip_safe=False,
   install_requires=['distribute'],
)

where myapp/data/ is the location of the data files.

Answer 1

I realize that this is an old question, but for people finding their way here via Google: package_data is a low-down, dirty lie. It is only used when building binary packages (python setup.py bdist ...) but not when building source packages (python setup.py sdist ...). This is, of course, ridiculous -- one would expect that building a source distribution would result in a collection of files that could be sent to someone else to built the binary distribution.

In any case, using MANIFEST.in will work both for binary and for source distributions.