How to make pip write a default config file when installing a python package?

Question

I'm packaging an in-house python app. My dir structure is something like:

/config
    \-- config.yaml
/app
    \-- ... (python files here...)

I've created a MANIFEST.in containing:

include config/*.yaml

When I extract the tarball created after running ./setup.py sdist, there are 2 directories, config (containing my config.yaml file) and app containing my package. However, when I pip install my app, only the python code is installed in dist-packages.

How can I make pip/setuptools copy config/config.yaml to /etc/xdg/app/ when I run pip install app?

Alternatively how can I at least make the config.yaml file end up somewhere on the filesystem so I can copy it where I want it later (e.g. /usr/share or somewhere - I don't care where it ends up after being installed)?

Answer 1

The docs section Installing Additional Files Doc suggests:

You can set the relative real path into data_files.

setup(...,
          data_files=[...,
                      ('/etc/xdg/app/', ['config/config.yaml'])]
     )

Obs: "Note that you can specify the directory names where the data files will be installed, but you cannot rename the data files themselves."