Include file in bdist_wheel but not sdist

Question

Many people have complained about setuptools not including things mentioned in package_data when making an sdist. (See here and here and here.) However, it appears that this was changed at some point, so that items mentioned in package_data are included not only in bdist_wheels but in sdists also. My problem is that I want the old behavior; I want a file (namely, a compiled executable) to be included in the bdist_wheel, but not the sdist. How do I do that now?

Answer 1

Disclaimer

Although it's technically possible, beware that when the source dist doesn't contain the file and wheel does, you will end up in having different installations of the same package for the same metadata, which is a bad behaviour. In the example below,

$ pip install spam --only-binary=spam  # force installation from wheel

will install file.txt:

$ pip show -f spam | grep file.txt
  spam/file.txt

while

$ pip install spam --no-binary=spam  # force installation from source dist

will not. This is a definite source for introducing new errors and no user will ever say thanks to you for this decision.

---

If you are really sure this is what you need: you can exclude the file in MANIFEST.in. Example:

project
├── spam
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── file.txt
├── MANIFEST.in
└── setup.py

MANIFEST.in

exclude spam/file.txt

setup.py

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='spam',
    version='0.1',
    packages=['spam'],
    package_data={'spam': ['file.txt']},
)

Building wheel:

$ python setup.py bdist_wheel >/dev/null 2>&1 && unzip -l dist/spam-*.whl | grep file.txt
    0  04-17-2019 21:25   spam/file.txt

Building source dist:

$ python setup.py sdist --formats=zip >/dev/null 2>&1 && unzip -l dist/spam-*.zip | grep file.txt
<empty>