Building Your Extension with distutils

To build the example in A Simple C++ Example using distutils, it is sufficient to create a standard setup.py, listing word.sip among the files to build, and hook-up SIP into distutils:

from distutils.core import setup, Extension
import sipdistutils

setup(
  name = 'word',
  versione = '1.0',
  ext_modules=[
    Extension("word", ["word.sip", "word.cpp"]),
    ],

  cmdclass = {'build_ext': sipdistutils.build_ext}
)

As we can see, the above is a normal distutils setup script, with just a special line which is needed so that SIP can see and process word.sip. Then, running setup.py build will build our extension module.

If you want to use any of sip’s command-line options described in The SIP Command Line, there is a new option available for the build_ext command in distutils: --sip-opts. So you can either invoke distutils as follows:

$ python setup.py build_ext --sip-opts="-e -g" build

or you can leverage distutils’ config file support by creating a setup.cfg file in the supported system or local paths (eg: in the same directory of setup.py) with these contents:

[build_ext]
sip-opts = -e -g

and then run setup.py build as usual.