Abstract

While distutils / setuptools have taken us a long way, they suffer from three serious problems: (a) they’re missing important features like usable build-time dependency declaration, autoconfiguration, and even basic ergonomic niceties like DRY-compliant version number management, and (b) extending them is difficult, so while there do exist various solutions to the above problems, they’re often quirky, fragile, and expensive to maintain, and yet (c) it’s very difficult to use anything else, because distutils/setuptools provide the standard interface for installing packages expected by both users and installation tools like pip.

Previous efforts (e.g. distutils2 or setuptools itself) have attempted to solve problems (a) and/or (b). This proposal aims to solve (c).

The goal of this PEP is get distutils-sig out of the business of being a gatekeeper for Python build systems. If you want to use distutils, great; if you want to use something else, then that should be easy to do using standardized methods. The difficulty of interfacing with distutils means that there aren’t many such systems right now, but to give a sense of what we’re thinking about see flit or bento. Fortunately, wheels have now solved many of the hard problems here – e.g. it’s no longer necessary that a build system also know about every possible installation configuration – so pretty much all we really need from a build system is that it have some way to spit out standard-compliant wheels and sdists.

We therefore propose a new, relatively minimal interface for installation tools like pip to interact with package source trees and source distributions.

Terminology and goals

A source tree is something like a VCS checkout. We need a standard interface for installing from this format, to support usages like pip install some-directory/.

A source distribution is a static snapshot representing a particular release of some source code, like lxml-3.4.4.tar.gz. Source distributions serve many purposes: they form an archival record of releases, they provide a stupid-simple de facto standard for tools that want to ingest and process large corpora of code, possibly written in many languages (e.g. code search), they act as the input to downstream packaging systems like Debian/Fedora/Conda/…, and so forth. In the Python ecosystem they additionally have a particularly important role to play, because packaging tools like pip are able to use source distributions to fulfill binary dependencies, e.g. if there is a distribution foo.whl which declares a dependency on bar, then we need to support the case where pip install bar or pip install foo automatically locates the sdist for bar, downloads it, builds it, and installs the resulting package.

Source distributions are also known as sdists for short.

A build frontend is a tool that users might run that takes arbitrary source trees or source distributions and builds wheels from them. The actual building is done by each source tree’s build backend. In a command like pip wheel some-directory/, pip is acting as a build frontend.

An integration frontend is a tool that users might run that takes a set of package requirements (e.g. a requirements.txt file) and attempts to update a working environment to satisfy those requirements. This may require locating, building, and installing a combination of wheels and sdists. In a command like pip install lxml==2.4.0, pip is acting as an integration frontend.

Source trees

There is an existing, legacy source tree format involving setup.py. We don’t try to specify it further; its de facto specification is encoded in the source code and documentation of distutils, setuptools, pip, and other tools. We’ll refer to it as the setup.py-style.

Here we define a new style of source tree based around the pyproject.toml file defined in PEP 518, extending the [build-system] table in that file with one additional key, build-backend. Here’s an example of how it would look:

[build-system]
# Defined by PEP 518:
requires = ["flit"]
# Defined by this PEP:
build-backend = "flit.api:main"

build-backend is a string naming a Python object that will be used to perform the build (see below for details). This is formatted following the same module:object syntax as a setuptools entry point. For instance, if the string is "flit.api:main" as in the example above, this object would be looked up by executing the equivalent of:

import flit.api
backend = flit.api.main

It’s also legal to leave out the :object part, e.g.

build-backend = "flit.api"

which acts like:

import flit.api
backend = flit.api

Formally, the string should satisfy this grammar:

identifier = (letter | '_') (letter | '_' | digit)*
module_path = identifier ('.' identifier)*
object_path = identifier ('.' identifier)*
entry_point = module_path (':' object_path)?

And we import module_path and then lookup module_path.object_path (or just module_path if object_path is missing).

When importing the module path, we do not look in the directory containing the source tree, unless that would be on sys.path anyway (e.g. because it is specified in PYTHONPATH). Although Python automatically adds the working directory to sys.path in some situations, code to resolve the backend should not be affected by this.

If the pyproject.toml file is absent, or the build-backend key is missing, the source tree is not using this specification, and tools should revert to the legacy behaviour of running setup.py (either directly, or by implicitly invoking the setuptools.build_meta:__legacy__ backend).

Where the build-backend key exists, this takes precedence and the source tree follows the format and conventions of the specified backend (as such no setup.py is needed unless the backend requires it). Projects may still wish to include a setup.py for compatibility with tools that do not use this spec.

This PEP also defines a backend-path key for use in pyproject.toml, see the “In-Tree Build Backends” section below. This key would be used as follows:

[build-system]
# Defined by PEP 518:
requires = ["flit"]
# Defined by this PEP:
build-backend = "local_backend"
backend-path = ["backend"]

Build backend interface

The build backend object is expected to have attributes which provide some or all of the following hooks. The common config_settings argument is described after the individual hooks.

def build_wheel(wheel_directory, config_settings=None, metadata_directory=None):
    ...

def build_sdist(sdist_directory, config_settings=None):
    ...

def get_requires_for_build_wheel(config_settings=None):
    ...

def get_requires_for_build_wheel(config_settings):
    return ["wheel >= 0.25", "setuptools"]

def prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel(metadata_directory, config_settings=None):
    ...

def get_requires_for_build_sdist(config_settings=None):
    ...

config_settings

pip install                                           \
  --package-config CC=gcc                             \
  --global-option="--some-global-option"              \
  --build-option="--build-option1"                    \
  --build-option="--build-option2"

{
 "CC": "gcc",
 "--global-option": ["--some-global-option"],
 "--build-option": ["--build-option1", "--build-option2"],
}

Source distributions

We continue with the legacy sdist format, adding some new restrictions. This format is mostly undefined, but basically comes down to: a file named {NAME}-{VERSION}.{EXT}, which unpacks into a buildable source tree called {NAME}-{VERSION}/. Traditionally these have always contained setup.py-style source trees; we now allow them to also contain pyproject.toml-style source trees.

Integration frontends require that an sdist named {NAME}-{VERSION}.{EXT} will generate a wheel named {NAME}-{VERSION}-{COMPAT-INFO}.whl.

The new restrictions for sdists built by PEP 517 backends are:

• They will be gzipped tar archives, with the .tar.gz extension. Zip archives, or other compression formats for tarballs, are not allowed at present.
• Tar archives must be created in the modern POSIX.1-2001 pax tar format, which uses UTF-8 for file names.
• The source tree contained in an sdist is expected to include the pyproject.toml file.

Evolutionary notes

A goal here is to make it as simple as possible to convert old-style sdists to new-style sdists. (E.g., this is one motivation for supporting dynamic build requirements.) The ideal would be that there would be a single static pyproject.toml that could be dropped into any “version 0” VCS checkout to convert it to the new shiny. This is probably not 100% possible, but we can get close, and it’s important to keep track of how close we are… hence this section.

A rough plan would be: Create a build system package (setuptools_pypackage or whatever) that knows how to speak whatever hook language we come up with, and convert them into calls to setup.py. This will probably require some sort of hooking or monkeypatching to setuptools to provide a way to extract the setup_requires= argument when needed, and to provide a new version of the sdist command that generates the new-style format. This all seems doable and sufficient for a large proportion of packages (though obviously we’ll want to prototype such a system before we finalize anything here). (Alternatively, these changes could be made to setuptools itself rather than going into a separate package.)

But there remain two obstacles that mean we probably won’t be able to automatically upgrade packages to the new format:

1. There currently exist packages which insist on particular packages being available in their environment before setup.py is executed. This means that if we decide to execute build scripts in an isolated virtualenv-like environment, then projects will need to check whether they do this, and if so then when upgrading to the new system they will have to start explicitly declaring these dependencies (either via setup_requires= or via static declaration in pyproject.toml).
2. There currently exist packages which do not declare consistent metadata (e.g. egg_info and bdist_wheel might get different install_requires=). When upgrading to the new system, projects will have to evaluate whether this applies to them, and if so they will need to stop doing that.

Rejected options

• We discussed making the wheel and sdist hooks build unpacked directories containing the same contents as their respective archives. In some cases this could avoid the need to pack and unpack an archive, but this seems like premature optimisation. It’s advantageous for tools to work with archives as the canonical interchange formats (especially for wheels, where the archive format is already standardised). Close control of archive creation is important for reproducible builds. And it’s not clear that tasks requiring an unpacked distribution will be more common than those requiring an archive.
• We considered an extra hook to copy files to a build directory before invoking build_wheel. Looking at existing build systems, we found that passing a build directory into build_wheel made more sense for many tools than pre-emptively copying files into a build directory.
• The idea of passing build_wheel a build directory was then also deemed an unnecessary complication. Build tools can use a temporary directory or a cache directory to store intermediate files while building. If there is a need, a frontend-controlled cache directory could be added in the future.
• For build_sdist to signal a failure for an expected reason, various options were debated at great length, including raising NotImplementedError and returning either NotImplemented or None. Please do not attempt to reopen this discussion without an extremely good reason, because we are quite tired of it.
• Allowing the backend to be imported from files in the source tree would be more consistent with the way Python imports often work. However, not allowing this prevents confusing errors from clashing module names. The initial version of this PEP did not provide a means to allow backends to be imported from files within the source tree, but the backend-path key was added in the next revision to allow projects to opt into this behaviour if needed.

Summary of changes to PEP 517

The following changes were made to this PEP after the initial reference implementation was released in pip 19.0.

• Cycles in build requirements were explicitly prohibited.
• Support for in-tree backends and self-hosting of backends was added by the introduction of the backend-path key in the [build-system] table.
• Clarified that the setuptools.build_meta:__legacy__ PEP 517 backend is an acceptable alternative to directly invoking setup.py for source trees that don’t specify build-backend explicitly.

Appendix A: Comparison to PEP 516

PEP 516 is a competing proposal to specify a build system interface, which has now been rejected in favour of this PEP. The primary difference is that our build backend is defined via a Python hook-based interface rather than a command-line based interface.

This appendix documents the arguments advanced for this PEP over PEP 516.

We do not expect that specifying Python hooks rather than command line interfaces will, by itself, reduce the complexity of calling into the backend, because build frontends will in any case want to run hooks inside a child – this is important to isolate the build frontend itself from the backend code and to better control the build backends execution environment. So under both proposals, there will need to be some code in pip to spawn a subprocess and talk to some kind of command-line/IPC interface, and there will need to be some code in the subprocess that knows how to parse these command line arguments and call the actual build backend implementation. So this diagram applies to all proposals equally:

+-----------+          +---------------+           +----------------+
| frontend  | -spawn-> | child cmdline | -Python-> |    backend     |
|   (pip)   |          |   interface   |           | implementation |
+-----------+          +---------------+           +----------------+

The key difference between the two approaches is how these interface boundaries map onto project structure:

.-= This PEP =-.

+-----------+          +---------------+    |      +----------------+
| frontend  | -spawn-> | child cmdline | -Python-> |    backend     |
|   (pip)   |          |   interface   |    |      | implementation |
+-----------+          +---------------+    |      +----------------+
                                            |
|______________________________________|    |
   Owned by pip, updated in lockstep        |
                                            |
                                            |
                                 PEP-defined interface boundary
                               Changes here require distutils-sig


.-= Alternative =-.

+-----------+    |     +---------------+           +----------------+
| frontend  | -spawn-> | child cmdline | -Python-> |    backend     |
|   (pip)   |    |     |   interface   |           | implementation |
+-----------+    |     +---------------+           +----------------+
                 |
                 |     |____________________________________________|
                 |      Owned by build backend, updated in lockstep
                 |
    PEP-defined interface boundary
  Changes here require distutils-sig

By moving the PEP-defined interface boundary into Python code, we gain three key advantages.

First, because there will likely be only a small number of build frontends (pip, and… maybe a few others?), while there will likely be a long tail of custom build backends (since these are chosen separately by each package to match their particular build requirements), the actual diagrams probably look more like:

.-= This PEP =-.

+-----------+          +---------------+           +----------------+
| frontend  | -spawn-> | child cmdline | -Python+> |    backend     |
|   (pip)   |          |   interface   |        |  | implementation |
+-----------+          +---------------+        |  +----------------+
                                                |
                                                |  +----------------+
                                                +> |    backend     |
                                                |  | implementation |
                                                |  +----------------+
                                                :
                                                :

.-= Alternative =-.

+-----------+          +---------------+           +----------------+
| frontend  | -spawn+> | child cmdline | -Python-> |    backend     |
|   (pip)   |       |  |   interface   |           | implementation |
+-----------+       |  +---------------+           +----------------+
                    |
                    |  +---------------+           +----------------+
                    +> | child cmdline | -Python-> |    backend     |
                    |  |   interface   |           | implementation |
                    |  +---------------+           +----------------+
                    :
                    :

That is, this PEP leads to less total code in the overall ecosystem. And in particular, it reduces the barrier to entry of making a new build system. For example, this is a complete, working build backend:

# mypackage_custom_build_backend.py
import os.path
import pathlib
import shutil
import tarfile

SDIST_NAME = "mypackage-0.1"
SDIST_FILENAME = SDIST_NAME + ".tar.gz"
WHEEL_FILENAME = "mypackage-0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl"

#################
# sdist creation
#################

def _exclude_hidden_and_special_files(archive_entry):
    """Tarfile filter to exclude hidden and special files from the archive"""
    if archive_entry.isfile() or archive_entry.isdir():
        if not os.path.basename(archive_entry.name).startswith("."):
            return archive_entry

def _make_sdist(sdist_dir):
    """Make an sdist and return both the Python object and its filename"""
    sdist_path = pathlib.Path(sdist_dir) / SDIST_FILENAME
    sdist = tarfile.open(sdist_path, "w:gz", format=tarfile.PAX_FORMAT)
    # Tar up the whole directory, minus hidden and special files
    sdist.add(os.getcwd(), arcname=SDIST_NAME,
              filter=_exclude_hidden_and_special_files)
    return sdist, SDIST_FILENAME

def build_sdist(sdist_dir, config_settings):
    """PEP 517 sdist creation hook"""
    sdist, sdist_filename = _make_sdist(sdist_dir)
    return sdist_filename

#################
# wheel creation
#################

def get_requires_for_build_wheel(config_settings):
    """PEP 517 wheel building dependency definition hook"""
    # As a simple static requirement, this could also just be
    # listed in the project's build system dependencies instead
    return ["wheel"]

def build_wheel(wheel_directory,
                metadata_directory=None, config_settings=None):
    """PEP 517 wheel creation hook"""
    from wheel.archive import archive_wheelfile
    path = os.path.join(wheel_directory, WHEEL_FILENAME)
    archive_wheelfile(path, "src/")
    return WHEEL_FILENAME

Of course, this is a terrible build backend: it requires the user to have manually set up the wheel metadata in src/mypackage-0.1.dist-info/; when the version number changes it must be manually updated in multiple places… but it works, and more features could be added incrementally. Much experience suggests that large successful projects often originate as quick hacks (e.g., Linux – “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional”; IPython/Jupyter – a grad student’s $PYTHONSTARTUP file), so if our goal is to encourage the growth of a vibrant ecosystem of good build tools, it’s important to minimize the barrier to entry.

Second, because Python provides a simpler yet richer structure for describing interfaces, we remove unnecessary complexity from the specification – and specifications are the worst place for complexity, because changing specifications requires painful consensus-building across many stakeholders. In the command-line interface approach, we have to come up with ad hoc ways to map multiple different kinds of inputs into a single linear command line (e.g. how do we avoid collisions between user-specified configuration arguments and PEP-defined arguments? how do we specify optional arguments? when working with a Python interface these questions have simple, obvious answers). When spawning and managing subprocesses, there are many fiddly details that must be gotten right, subtle cross-platform differences, and some of the most obvious approaches – e.g., using stdout to return data for the build_requires operation – can create unexpected pitfalls (e.g., what happens when computing the build requirements requires spawning some child processes, and these children occasionally print an error message to stdout? obviously a careful build backend author can avoid this problem, but the most obvious way of defining a Python interface removes this possibility entirely, because the hook return value is clearly demarcated).

In general, the need to isolate build backends into their own process means that we can’t remove IPC complexity entirely – but by placing both sides of the IPC channel under the control of a single project, we make it much cheaper to fix bugs in the IPC interface than if fixing bugs requires coordinated agreement and coordinated changes across the ecosystem.

Third, and most crucially, the Python hook approach gives us much more powerful options for evolving this specification in the future.

For concreteness, imagine that next year we add a new build_sdist_from_vcs hook, which provides an alternative to the current build_sdist hook where the frontend is responsible for passing version control tracking metadata to backends (including indicating when all on disk files are tracked), rather than individual backends having to query that information themselves. In order to manage the transition, we’d want it to be possible for build frontends to transparently use build_sdist_from_vcs when available and fall back onto build_sdist otherwise; and we’d want it to be possible for build backends to define both methods, for compatibility with both old and new build frontends.

Furthermore, our mechanism should also fulfill two more goals: (a) If new versions of e.g. pip and flit are both updated to support the new interface, then this should be sufficient for it to be used; in particular, it should not be necessary for every project that uses flit to update its individual pyproject.toml file. (b) We do not want to have to spawn extra processes just to perform this negotiation, because process spawns can easily become a bottleneck when deploying large multi-package stacks on some platforms (Windows).

In the interface described here, all of these goals are easy to achieve. Because pip controls the code that runs inside the child process, it can easily write it to do something like:

command, backend, args = parse_command_line_args(...)
if command == "build_sdist":
   if hasattr(backend, "build_sdist_from_vcs"):
       backend.build_sdist_from_vcs(...)
   elif hasattr(backend, "build_sdist"):
       backend.build_sdist(...)
   else:
       # error handling

In the alternative where the public interface boundary is placed at the subprocess call, this is not possible – either we need to spawn an extra process just to query what interfaces are supported (as was included in an earlier draft of PEP 516, an alternative to this), or else we give up on autonegotiation entirely (as in the current version of that PEP), meaning that any changes in the interface will require N individual packages to update their pyproject.toml files before any change can go live, and that any changes will necessarily be restricted to new releases.

One specific consequence of this is that in this PEP, we’re able to make the prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel command optional. In our design, this can be readily handled by build frontends, which can put code in their subprocess runner like:

def dump_wheel_metadata(backend, working_dir):
    """Dumps wheel metadata to working directory.

       Returns absolute path to resulting metadata directory
    """
    if hasattr(backend, "prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel"):
        subdir = backend.prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel(working_dir)
    else:
        wheel_fname = backend.build_wheel(working_dir)
        already_built = os.path.join(working_dir, "ALREADY_BUILT_WHEEL")
        with open(already_built, "w") as f:
            f.write(wheel_fname)
        subdir = unzip_metadata(os.path.join(working_dir, wheel_fname))
    return os.path.join(working_dir, subdir)

def ensure_wheel_is_built(backend, output_dir, working_dir, metadata_dir):
    """Ensures built wheel is available in output directory

       Returns absolute path to resulting wheel file
    """
    already_built = os.path.join(working_dir, "ALREADY_BUILT_WHEEL")
    if os.path.exists(already_built):
        with open(already_built, "r") as f:
            wheel_fname = f.read().strip()
        working_path = os.path.join(working_dir, wheel_fname)
        final_path = os.path.join(output_dir, wheel_fname)
        os.rename(working_path, final_path)
        os.remove(already_built)
    else:
        wheel_fname = backend.build_wheel(output_dir, metadata_dir=metadata_dir)
    return os.path.join(output_dir, wheel_fname)

and thus expose a totally uniform interface to the rest of the frontend, with no extra subprocess calls, no duplicated builds, etc. But obviously this is the kind of code that you only want to write as part of a private, within-project interface (e.g. the given example requires that the working directory be shared between the two calls, but not with any other wheel builds, and that the return value from the metadata helper function will be passed back in to the wheel building one).

(And, of course, making the metadata command optional is one piece of lowering the barrier to entry for developing new backends, as discussed above.)

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.