How to ship or distribute a matplotlib stylesheet

Question

I want to distribute a custom matplotlib style sheet, but right now the only way I can think of is uploading it to Gist or some other website and tell my users to manually download it to some configuration directory.

Is there a way to distribute a style sheet as if it were a Python package, or as part of a module? Something easy like pip install mpl_fancy.

Answer 1

After reading the link from @aloctavodia and consulting the massmutual/mmviz-python GitHub repo, this is what I came up with.

setup.py

from setuptools import setup
from setuptools.command.install import install
import os
import shutil
import atexit

import matplotlib

def install_mplstyle():
    stylefile = "mystyle.mplstyle"

    mpl_stylelib_dir = os.path.join(matplotlib.get_configdir() ,"stylelib")
    if not os.path.exists(mpl_stylelib_dir):
        os.makedirs(mpl_stylelib_dir)

    print("Installing style into", mpl_stylelib_dir)
    shutil.copy(
        os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), stylefile),
        os.path.join(mpl_stylelib_dir, stylefile))

class PostInstallMoveFile(install):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        atexit.register(install_mplstyle)

setup(
    name='my-style',
    version='0.1.0',
    py_modules=['my_style'],
    install_requires=[
        'matplotlib',
    ],
    cmdclass={
        'install': PostInstallMoveFile,
    }
)

Into my_style.py I just put a basic example script. Now, my users can install this style with pip install git+https://github.com/me/my-style!