summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/docs/userguide/development_mode.rst
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/userguide/development_mode.rst')
-rw-r--r--docs/userguide/development_mode.rst52
1 files changed, 52 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/userguide/development_mode.rst b/docs/userguide/development_mode.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..90bc5676
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/userguide/development_mode.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+"Development Mode"
+==================
+
+Under normal circumstances, the ``distutils`` assume that you are going to
+build a distribution of your project, not use it in its "raw" or "unbuilt"
+form. However, if you were to use the ``distutils`` to build a distribution,
+you would have to rebuild and reinstall your project every time you made a
+change to it during development.
+
+Another problem that sometimes comes up with the ``distutils`` is that you may
+need to do development on two related projects at the same time. You may need
+to put both projects' packages in the same directory to run them, but need to
+keep them separate for revision control purposes. How can you do this?
+
+Setuptools allows you to deploy your projects for use in a common directory or
+staging area, but without copying any files. Thus, you can edit each project's
+code in its checkout directory, and only need to run build commands when you
+change a project's C extensions or similarly compiled files. You can even
+deploy a project into another project's checkout directory, if that's your
+preferred way of working (as opposed to using a common independent staging area
+or the site-packages directory).
+
+To do this, use the ``setup.py develop`` command. It works very similarly to
+``setup.py install``, except that it doesn't actually install anything.
+Instead, it creates a special ``.egg-link`` file in the deployment directory,
+that links to your project's source code. And, if your deployment directory is
+Python's ``site-packages`` directory, it will also update the
+``easy-install.pth`` file to include your project's source code, thereby making
+it available on ``sys.path`` for all programs using that Python installation.
+
+In addition, the ``develop`` command creates wrapper scripts in the target
+script directory that will run your in-development scripts after ensuring that
+all your ``install_requires`` packages are available on ``sys.path``.
+
+You can deploy the same project to multiple staging areas, e.g. if you have
+multiple projects on the same machine that are sharing the same project you're
+doing development work.
+
+When you're done with a given development task, you can remove the project
+source from a staging area using ``setup.py develop --uninstall``, specifying
+the desired staging area if it's not the default.
+
+There are several options to control the precise behavior of the ``develop``
+command; see the section on the :ref:`develop <develop>` command below for more details.
+
+Note that you can also apply setuptools commands to non-setuptools projects,
+using commands like this::
+
+ python -c "import setuptools; with open('setup.py') as f: exec(compile(f.read(), 'setup.py', 'exec'))" develop
+
+That is, you can simply list the normal setup commands and options following
+the quoted part.