[Python Text RPG 1] Making the Python Boilerplate

Continuing from the previous tutorial, we’ll now be filling out skeleton files and getting ready to start writing code.

Writing Files

For the sake of time, we are going to copy-and-paste a lot in this tutorial. A short explanation of what is going on in each file will also be included.

setup.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from setuptools import setup, find_packages


with open('README') as f:
    readme = f.read()

with open('LICENSE') as f:
    license = f.read()

setup(
    name='dungeoncrawler2',
    version='0.1.0',
    description='A text-based RPG written in Python 3',
    long_description=readme,
    author='Nam Tran',
    author_email='tranngocnam97@gmail.com',
    url='https://github.com/omn0mn0m/Dungeon-Crawler-2',
    license=license,
    packages=find_packages(exclude=('tests', 'docs'))
)

Makefile

init:
	pip3 install -r requirements.txt

test:
	python3 -m pytest --cov=dungeoncrawler2

.PHONY: init test

Now would be a good time to note that I use pip3 and python3 in my Makefile. If you only have Python 3 installed, you can use pip and python, respectively.

Setting Up virtualenv

virtualenv is a Python package for creating isolated development environments for each Python project you are working on. To use it, first you have to install it: pip3 install virtualenv

Now within your project root directory, type virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.6 venv

From now on, any time you want to program you need to first run source venv/bin/activate in your project root. When you are done with the virtual environment, run deactivate

Conclusion

What we have completed is created most of the environment necessary for starting to write our code. You should be good to commit and push everything to GitHub.

If you have been paying close attention, you should have noticed we haven’t done anything to the docs directory. That’s for a later tutorial. For now, we just set up the files necessary to start coding. In next tutorial, we’ll start writing some Python!