Python package's metadata in json

__init__.py

from .some import dependet_function
from ._version import __version__  # Safely load data

README.md

My solution for package versioning in modern python

Credits to this post

Assume this is our project.

code/  # Repo root
  mypkg/  # Package
    __init__.py
    _version.py
    meta.json
  setup.py

If you are here you probably know that you can't directly import __version__ into setup.py. It will raise an error.

To prevent that, we will take some metadata from setup.py and put it into meta.json That will allow to safely share data between package and setup.py because any dependency code won't be executed.

_version.py

import json
from pathlib import Path

with open(Path(__file__).parent.joinpath('meta.json')) as f:
    __meta_json__ = json.load(f)
    __version__ = __meta_json__['version']
    __author__ = __meta_json__['author']
    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/21356350/9256726 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/24293364/9256726

setup.py

import json
from pathlib import Path

from setuptools import setup

with open(Path('mypkg').joinpath('meta.json')) as f:
    __meta_json__ = json.load(f)

setup(
    name="mypkg",
    packages=["mypkg"],
    install_requires=["pyyaml>=5.0.0, httpx>=0.16.1"],
    **__meta_json__
)