Create and publish your own Python package

A short and simple guide on how to pip install your custom made package

These birds are pip installing from the source (image by James Wainscoat on Unsplash)

You are probably familiar with requests, Pandas, Numpy and many other packages that you can install with pip. Now it’s time to create your own package! In this article we’ll go through the required steps to package and publish your Python code for the whole world to pip install. First we’ll look at packaging your code, then how we can publish it to make it accessible.

(Would you rather share your code with just a select few people like coworkers? It’s also possible to allow people to pip install a package from a private repository. This even works when including your package in a Docker container!)

Goal and preparation

For this article, I’ve created a few truly essential functions that I’d like to share with the world. Let’s create a package called “mikes_toolbox” that people can use by simply pip install mikes_toolbox.

First we’ll sketch an overview of how the installation process works: if someone calls pip install mikes_toolbox the code has to come from somewhere. Pip searches for a package with that name on PyPi; the Python Package Index. You can think of this as a YouTube for Python packages. First we’ll package our code and then…