SVN

Python’s setuptools provide a simple mechanism to tag your built distributions with the SVN revision they belong to, by creating a setup.cfg file along the normal setup.py, and there write

[egg_info]
# Add svn revision to the file name
tag_svn_revision = 1

Git

How to do the same for Git? Or in general, with other information? (Date tagging is also supported by default).

Answer: modify directly the options dictionary in the call to setup, in setup.py. There, you can put anything you can compute with Python or system calls. E.g. for git:

import shlex
from subprocess import check_output

GIT_HEAD_REV = check_output(shlex.split('git rev-parse --short HEAD')).strip()


setup(
    # ... other keys like project name, version, etc ...
    options = dict(egg_info = dict(tag_build = "dev_" + GIT_HEAD_REV)),
)

With that setup, distributions (sdist or bdist) would be tagged with the string “dev” and the git hash of the latest commit:

$ bin/python setup.py sdist bdist_egg
$ ls dist
pyhello-0.1dev-92ffa06.tar.gz    pyhello-0.1dev_92ffa06-py2.7.egg

Whenever you want to build a stable release (without any “dev” tags), just set the key to empty in your setup.cfg, like this:

[egg_info]
tag_build =