[Free] Creating A Python Software Package With Best Practices
Starting a python package on the right foot with the MolSSI cookiecutter template.
Requirements
- Basic python programming
Description
When working with python, many developers often start with scripts to achieve specific goals. As they continue to develop, they often begin to see a potential benefit to the wider software community to share their efforts. Turning your code into a python package will enable you to deploy and share your code through package management tools, such as pip and conda, allowing other users to easily obtain and work with your code.
Creating a python package can come with a number of additional difficulties, such as understanding the python build system and including proper documentation. As code bases develop, they often become more complicated or gain additional developers. Including some software best practices: testing, version control, or continuous integration; will improve your development process. However, getting the best practices put in place and setting up the python packaging files can be a tedious experience.
To solve this problem, you can use a software called Cookiecutter, which is an open source tool to create projects from project templates. Cookiecutter uses a template to prompt you with a few questions about your project, and uses your answers to produce a set of files and folders in your filesystem. MolSSI has developed a template to support the development of python packages that implements a number of best practices in software design to give a developer a head start on creating a python package.
Through these lessons, you will obtain the Cookiecutter software, run it with the MolSSI Cookiecutter Template, and learn about the files that the Cookiecutter has produced. We will give a brief overview of why we think the included best practices are important. We hope you gain a further interest in expanding your software development skills and look into utilizing all the best practices the Cookiecutter has put in place for you.
Author(s): The Molecular Sciences Software Institute
