# 2.6 Installing Additional Files

The data_files option can be used to specify additional files needed by the module distribution: configuration files, message catalogs, data files, anything which doesn't fit in the previous categories.

data_files specifies a sequence of (directory, files) pairs in the following way:

    setup(...
          data_files=[('bitmaps', ['bm/b1.gif', 'bm/b2.gif']),
                      ('config', ['cfg/data.cfg']),
                      ('/etc/init.d', ['init-script'])]
         )

Note that you can specify the directory names where the data files will be installed, but you cannot rename the data files themselves.

Each (directory, files) pair in the sequence specifies the installation directory and the files to install there. If directory is a relative path, it is interpreted relative to the installation prefix (Python's `sys.prefix` for pure-Python packages, `sys.exec_prefix` for packages that contain extension modules). Each file name in files is interpreted relative to the setup.py script at the top of the package source distribution. No directory information from files is used to determine the final location of the installed file; only the name of the file is used.

You can specify the data_files options as a simple sequence of files without specifying a target directory, but this is not recommended, and the `install` command will print a warning in this case. To install data files directly in the target directory, an empty string should be given as the directory.