This is the introduction post for pythong a minimal, yet comfortable project bootstrapping tool. It’s intended to replace the now-unmaintained “paster create”. It will walk you through creating the project directory structure and prompt you for the information you need to build a good setup.py using the most recent packaging idioms.

This means distutils, first of all, and we built prompts to help walk you through the process of creating a distribute-based setup script.

The directory structure is simple and has as few opinions as it can. It looks like this.

$ tree libshiny
libshiny
├── bin
├── docs
├── libshiny
│   └── __init__.py
├── setup.py
├── distribute_setup.py
└── tests
    ├── __init__.py
    └── libshiny_tests.py

There’s a lot more work to be done on it, like giving people the option to use a full editor instead of having to use the CLI for all input.

It works, and if you do use it and find issues, file an issue on Github and we’ll do what we can.