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I am writing a new Python application that I intend to distribute to several colleagues. Instead of my normal carefree attitude of just having everything self contained and run inside a folder in my home directory, this time I would like to broaden my horizon and actually try to utilize the Linux directory structure as it was intended (at least somewhat). Can you please read my breakdown below and comment and or make recommendations if this is not correct.

Lets call the application "narf"

/usr/narf - Install location for the actual python file(s).    
/usr/bin/narf - Either a softlink to the main python file above or use this location instead.    
/etc/narf - Any configuration files for app narf.    
/var/log/narf - Any log files for app narf.    
/usr/lib - Any required libraries for app narf.    
/run/narf - Any persistent (across reboot), but still temp files for app narf.    
/tmp/narf - Very temp files for app narf that go away with reboot

I assume I should stick to using /usr/X (for example /usr/bin instead of just /bin) since my application is not system critical and a mere addon.

I currently use Ubuntu 16 LTS, however part of this is intended as a way to try to standardize my app for any popular Linux distro.

Thanks for the help.

* UPDATE *

I think I see the answer to at least part of my question. Looking in /usr, I now see that it is a pretty barebones directory and almost akin to user level root directory (ie has bin, lib, local, sbin, etc. but thats pretty much all). This leads me to believe my application should absolutely NOT live in /usr, and ONLY in /usr/bin.

Atomiklan
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2 Answers2

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You'd be better off putting your entire application into /opt. See here: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy.html#opt

Then put a soft link to the executable into /usr/local/bin. see here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/8658/219043

I wouldn't worry about the rest.

Community
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Colin Nichols
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Your application should not live in the /usr/ directory. If you want to package your application into a distribution, please refer to these guides:

Packaging and Distributing Projects

How To Package And Distribute Python Applications

You can for sure write to unix directories within your application when appropriate, but keep in mind there are mechanisms built into setup.py that help with the installation side of this (for example).

If this is something private, I'd suggest making this a private repository on GitHub and have your colleagues install it through pip.

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Julien
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