Standard way to embed version into python package?

Question

Is there a standard way to associate version string with a python package in such way that I could do the following?

import foo
print foo.version

I would imagine there's some way to retrieve that data without any extra hardcoding, since minor/major strings are specified in setup.py already. Alternative solution that I found was to have import __version__ in my foo/__init__.py and then have __version__.py generated by setup.py.

Answer 1

I use a single _version.py file as the "once cannonical place" to store version information:

1. It provides a __version__ attribute.

2. It provides the standard metadata version. Therefore it will be detected by pkg_resources or other tools that parse the package metadata (EGG-INFO and/or PKG-INFO, PEP 0345).

3. It doesn't import your package (or anything else) when building your package, which can cause problems in some situations. (See the comments below about what problems this can cause.)

4. There is only one place that the version number is written down, so there is only one place to change it when the version number changes, and there is less chance of inconsistent versions.

Here is how it works: the "one canonical place" to store the version number is a .py file, named "_version.py" which is in your Python package, for example in myniftyapp/_version.py. This file is a Python module, but your setup.py doesn't import it! (That would defeat feature 3.) Instead your setup.py knows that the contents of this file is very simple, something like:

__version__ = "3.6.5"

And so your setup.py opens the file and parses it, with code like:

import re
VERSIONFILE="myniftyapp/_version.py"
verstrline = open(VERSIONFILE, "rt").read()
VSRE = r"^__version__ = ['\"]([^'\"]*)['\"]"
mo = re.search(VSRE, verstrline, re.M)
if mo:
    verstr = mo.group(1)
else:
    raise RuntimeError("Unable to find version string in %s." % (VERSIONFILE,))

Then your setup.py passes that string as the value of the "version" argument to setup(), thus satisfying feature 2.

To satisfy feature 1, you can have your package (at run-time, not at setup time!) import the _version file from myniftyapp/__init__.py like this:

from _version import __version__

Here is an example of this technique that I've been using for years.

The code in that example is a bit more complicated, but the simplified example that I wrote into this comment should be a complete implementation.

Here is example code of importing the version.

If you see anything wrong with this approach, please let me know.

Answer 2

I also saw another style:

>>> django.VERSION
(1, 1, 0, 'final', 0)

Answer 3

arrow handles it in an interesting way.

Now (since 2e5031b)

In arrow/__init__.py:

__version__ = 'x.y.z'

In setup.py:

from arrow import __version__

setup(
    name='arrow',
    version=__version__,
    # [...]
)

Before

In arrow/__init__.py:

__version__ = 'x.y.z'
VERSION = __version__

In setup.py:

def grep(attrname):
    pattern = r"{0}\W*=\W*'([^']+)'".format(attrname)
    strval, = re.findall(pattern, file_text)
    return strval

file_text = read(fpath('arrow/__init__.py'))

setup(
    name='arrow',
    version=grep('__version__'),
    # [...]
)

Answer 4

1. Use a version.py file only with __version__ = <VERSION> param in the file. In the setup.py file import the __version__ param and put it's value in the setup.py file like this: version=__version__
2. Another way is to use just a setup.py file with version=<CURRENT_VERSION> - the CURRENT_VERSION is hardcoded.

Since we don't want to manually change the version in the file every time we create a new tag (ready to release a new package version), we can use the following..

I highly recommend bumpversion package. I've been using it for years to bump a version.

start by adding version=<VERSION> to your setup.py file if you don't have it already.

You should use a short script like this every time you bump a version:

bumpversion (patch|minor|major) - choose only one option
git push
git push --tags

Then add one file per repo called: .bumpversion.cfg:

[bumpversion]
current_version = <CURRENT_TAG>
commit = True
tag = True
tag_name = {new_version}
[bumpversion:file:<RELATIVE_PATH_TO_SETUP_FILE>]

Note:

• You can use __version__ parameter under version.py file like it was suggested in other posts and update the bumpversion file like this: [bumpversion:file:<RELATIVE_PATH_TO_VERSION_FILE>]
• You must git commit or git reset everything in your repo, otherwise you'll get a dirty repo error.
• Make sure that your virtual environment includes the package of bumpversion, without it it will not work.

Answer 5

Using setuptools and pbr

There is not a standard way, but the standard way to manage your packages is setuptools.

The best solution I've found overall for managing version is to use setuptools with the pbr extension. This is now my standard way of managing version.

PBR moves most metadata out of the setup.py tools and into a setup.cfg file that is then used as a source for most metadata, which can include version. This allows the metadata to be packaged into an executable using something like pyinstaller if needed (if so, you will probably need this info), and separates the metadata from the other package management/setup scripts.

When using Git for VCS/SCM, this setup is even better, as it will pull in a lot of the metadata from Git so that your repo can be your primary source of truth for some of the metadata, including version, authors, changelogs, etc.

• PyPA - Packaging Python Packages with SetupTools - Tutorial
• PBR latest build usage documentation - How to setup an 8-line setup.py and a setup.cfg file with the metadata.

As PBR will pull version, author, changelog and other info directly from your git repo, so some of the metadata in setup.cfg can be left out and auto generated whenever a distribution is created for your package (using setup.py)

Real-time current version

setuptools will pull the latest info in real-time using setup.py:

python setup.py --version

This will pull the latest version either from the setup.cfg file, or from the git repo, based on the latest commit that was made and tags that exist in the repo. This command doesn't update the version in a distribution though.

Updating the version

When you create a distribution with setup.py (i.e. py setup.py sdist, for example), then all the current info will be extracted and stored in the distribution. This essentially runs the setup.py --version command and then stores that version info into the package.egg-info folder in a set of files that store distribution metadata.

Note on process to update version meta-data:

If you are not using pbr to pull version data from git, then just update your setup.cfg directly with new version info (easy enough, but make sure this is a standard part of your release process).

If you are using git, and you don't need to create a source or binary distribution (using python setup.py sdist or one of the python setup.py bdist_xxx commands) the simplest way to update the git repo info into your <mypackage>.egg-info metadata folder is to just run the python setup.py install command. This will run all the PBR functions related to pulling metadata from the git repo and update your local .egg-info folder, install script executables for any entry-points you have defined, and other functions you can see from the output when you run this command.

Note that the .egg-info folder is generally excluded from being stored in the git repo itself in standard Python .gitignore files (such as from Gitignore.IO), as it can be generated from your source. If it is excluded, make sure you have a standard "release process" to get the metadata updated locally before release, and any package you upload to PyPi.org or otherwise distribute must include this data to have the correct version. If you want the Git repo to contain this info, you can exclude specific files from being ignored (i.e. add !*.egg-info/PKG_INFO to .gitignore)

Accessing the version from a script

You can access the metadata from the current build within Python scripts in the package itself. For version, for example, there are several ways to do this I have found so far:

## This one is a new built-in as of Python 3.8.0 should become the standard
from importlib-metadata import version

v0 = version("mypackage")
print('v0 {}'.format(v0))

## I don't like this one because the version method is hidden
import pkg_resources  # part of setuptools

v1 = pkg_resources.require("mypackage")[0].version
print('v1 {}'.format(v1))

# Probably best for pre v3.8.0 - the output without .version is just a longer string with
# both the package name, a space, and the version string
import pkg_resources  # part of setuptools

v2 = pkg_resources.get_distribution('mypackage').version
print('v2 {}'.format(v2))

## This one seems to be slower, and with pyinstaller makes the exe a lot bigger
from pbr.version import VersionInfo

v3 = VersionInfo('mypackage').release_string()
print('v3 {}'.format(v3))

You can put one of these directly in your __init__.py for the package to extract the version info as follows, similar to some other answers:

__all__ = (
    '__version__',
    'my_package_name'
)

import pkg_resources  # part of setuptools

__version__ = pkg_resources.get_distribution("mypackage").version

Answer 6

Though this is probably far too late, there is a slightly simpler alternative to the previous answer:

__version_info__ = ('1', '2', '3')
__version__ = '.'.join(__version_info__)

(And it would be fairly simple to convert auto-incrementing portions of version numbers to a string using str().)

Of course, from what I've seen, people tend to use something like the previously-mentioned version when using __version_info__, and as such store it as a tuple of ints; however, I don't quite see the point in doing so, as I doubt there are situations where you would perform mathematical operations such as addition and subtraction on portions of version numbers for any purpose besides curiosity or auto-incrementation (and even then, int() and str() can be used fairly easily). (On the other hand, there is the possibility of someone else's code expecting a numerical tuple rather than a string tuple and thus failing.)

This is, of course, my own view, and I would gladly like others' input on using a numerical tuple.

---

As shezi reminded me, (lexical) comparisons of number strings do not necessarily have the same result as direct numerical comparisons; leading zeroes would be required to provide for that. So in the end, storing __version_info__ (or whatever it would be called) as a tuple of integer values would allow for more efficient version comparisons.