Why find_packages(exclude=xxx) does not work when doing setup.py sdist?

Question

I am packaging my source code, but I do not want to include tests and docs because it will be too big.

To do that I include in my setup.py:

setup(...
      packages=find_packages(exclude=['tests.*','tests','docs.*','docs']),
      ...
)

When doing a

python setup.py sdist

I can see that my root tests/ and docs/ dirs and everything inside are still included in the generated distribution.

It seems that only

python setup.py bdist

is sensible to the exclude parameter.

Why ? is it possible to exclude dirs for 'setup.py sdist' ?

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '18 at 18:11

22

I solved the problem by removing the *.egg-info/ directory : it seems that this directory memorized some older settings...

answered Feb 21 '18 at 18:11

Eric

2

This is quite odd. Your answer solved the issue for me and I had to run in circles for quite a while trying all different kind of solutions – Almog Cohen Sep 07 '18 at 21:17
very helpful. please make this as the answer. thanks! – Duc Nguyen Jun 24 '19 at 03:11
For people who intend to exclude packages recursively, they also need to exclude the wildcard variation. – kayochin Jun 14 '20 at 10:05
3

For anyone that finds this: I had to remove *.egg-info as well as the contents of the build/ directory after adding `recursive-exclude tests *` to the MANIFEST.in file and `["tests", "tests.*"]` to exclude. – bogeymin Sep 01 '20 at 15:15
For me, it was the same but I needed to remove the `build` folder. – lasote Oct 28 '21 at 16:15
Great, this helpful! – atline Nov 01 '21 at 12:41

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '21 at 07:13

I had the same problem, but I was being dumb and misusing the exclude parameter.

If you have

packages=setuptools.find_packages(exclude="tests")

You will be excluding the directories "t", "e", "s", "t", "s"

What you should have is this:

packages=setuptools.find_packages(exclude=["tests"])

2 Answers2