• For pure Python projects only

• Great option if you are just building a small module locally for use with no intentions of longer term maintenance. Or if you just want to publish to pypi quickly.

• Flit documentation

1. Light weight install w simple deps
2. Streamlined, no nonsense UI

flit init 
flit install 
flit build 
flit publish

2. Simple quick startup init and build check for things like

• correct imports of your package
• TOML format, url format etc
• catches a lot of simple but common mistakes you might make

• Wish that install editable was straight forward like pip install -e . symlink is something that would need explanation while pip install -e is something i'm used to using. I think symlink is the same as install -e but wish the syntax was the same for consistency. (cognitive load issue for beginners) <NOTE: there is an open issue about this on github>
• Doesn't support versioning - eg flit bump major

$ pip install flit

or

$ conda install -c conda-forge flit

The install for flit is light weight and fast.

Collecting flit
  Using cached flit-3.8.0-py3-none-any.whl (49 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: requests in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from flit) (2.27.1)
Collecting tomli-w
  Using cached tomli_w-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (6.0 kB)
Collecting flit_core>=3.8.0
  Using cached flit_core-3.8.0-py3-none-any.whl (62 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: docutils in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from flit) (0.17.1)
Requirement already satisfied: idna<4,>=2.5 in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from requests->flit) (3.3)
Requirement already satisfied: charset-normalizer~=2.0.0 in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from requests->flit) (2.0.4)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2017.4.17 in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from requests->flit) (2022.12.7)
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3<1.27,>=1.21.1 in ../miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from requests->flit) (1.26.9)
Installing collected packages: tomli-w, flit-core, flit
Successfully installed flit-3.8.0 flit-core-3.8.0 tomli-w-1.0.0

When you run flit init, it creates a clean pyproject.toml file with all of the basic metadata (and a license if you chose)

> flit init
Module name: examplePy
Author [law]: me myself and i
Author email [law@example.com]: me@email.com
Home page: pyopensci.org
Should start with http:// or https:// - try again.
Home page: https://pyopensci.org
Choose a license (see http://choosealicense.com/ for more info)
1. MIT - simple and permissive
2. Apache - explicitly grants patent rights
3. GPL - ensures that code based on this is shared with the same terms
4. Skip - choose a license later
Enter 1-4 [1]: 1

Written pyproject.toml; edit that file to add optional extra info.

flit publish

local install - i find these directions confusing as what is [--symlink] I don't understand how to install in interactive mode based on the docs.

flit install [--symlink] [--python path/to/python]

Flit doesn't have any command support for versions.

You update it yourself, manually. You can either manage it in the pyproject toml or set it to be "dynamic" (see below) if you want to update the version file.

If you want Flit to get the version from a __version__ attribute,

[project]
name = "astcheck"
authors = [
    {name = "Thomas Kluyver", email = "thomas@kluyver.me.uk"},
]
readme = "README.rst"
classifiers = [
    "License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License",
]
requires-python = ">=3.5"
dynamic = ["version", "description"]

dependencies = [
    "requests >=2.6",
    "configparser; python_version == '2.7'",
]

Flit supports entry points (TODO: don't fully understand what this would look like in a package)

https://flit.pypa.io/en/stable/pyproject_toml.html#scripts-section

flit build

you can customize what's in the sdist

[tool.flit.sdist]
include = ["doc/"]
exclude = ["doc/*.html"]

I'm not sure - if it is that simple and you need a diff back end i wonder why use it at all. might be best for small local modules or times when you just want to get something published but aren't invested in longer term maintenance?