Integrating with distutils/setuptools

Hello all,

Is there a clean and recommended way to integrate distutils/setuptools in a Visual Studio Python project?

I’m specifically looking at this from the context of a Python library developed under Visual Studio and distributed according to the Python Packaging Guidelines.

Ideally, any setup.py command could be run from Visual Studio, including OTOH :

• bdist_wheel to generate a Wheel package
• bdist_wininst to generate a Windows installer
• test for integrating unit/integration test frameworks (e.g. PyTest)

This is a hack, but adding this custom AfterBuild target in the .pyproj file generates a Windows installer when clicking on Rebuild project :

<Target Name="AfterBuild">
  <RunPythonCommand Target="setup.py" TargetType="script" Arguments="bdist_wininst" />
</Target>

[kraigb]

@fxthomas Thanks. The article is on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/python/defining-custom-python-project-commands now; I’ll be adding your examples shortly.

[int19h]

The snippet above is missing a quote in Outputs, and should result in the project not being loadable due to being invalid XML. If it’s a copy/pasted snippet, then perhaps you were accidentally editing the wrong file?

If that’s not the case, try setting MSBuild verbosity to diagnostic (Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run) - build output should then be detailed enough to see when it was considering your target, and why exactly it wasn’t run.

@(Compile) should be fine - it basically makes it depend on all project items that are defined as <Compile Include="...">, which should include all .py files by default.