How To Install Writable Shared And User Specific Data Files With Setuptools?

I know package_data. But it is for readonly data inside the package. Or is this assumption wrong? How to install shared or user specific writeable data? For example to ProgramData

Solution 1:

Your assumption seems right to me (package data should be read-only). For writable data: either let the user choose a target directory, or pick one directory according to a common convention. But this can not happen at install time. It's probably better to have your library or application check if these shared directories and files exist when they are needed, and if they don't then create them on the fly.

For example a pretty common convention is the XDG Base Directory Specification. These two projects can help write code according to this specification:

• https://pypi.org/project/appdirs/
• https://pypi.org/project/xdgappdirs/