This example shows how to use some basic features of setuptools.

The first one is install_requires which allows you to automatically install dependencies that you need.

Another one is entry_points, where you can declare console_scripts which will then be new commands available in your environment.

This particular example will install the requests package as a dependency, then install a new command mycommand in your environment. You can test it with the help of virtualenv:

$ virtualenv test
$ source test/bin/activate
(test)$ pip install ./mymodule/
(test)$ mycommand

You can also check what would happen if you were missing the dependencies and distributed the code without a setup.py. In this case, requests is not part of the standard library, so unless you install it, it would not be present. Please note that this time we cannot run mycommand since we are not installing mymodule.

$ virtualenv --clear test
$ source test/bin/activate
(test)$ cd mymodule
(test)$ python -c 'import mymodule.script; mymodule.script.main()'