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4. Creating a Source Distribution

As shown in section 1.2, you use the `sdist` command to create a source distribution. In the simplest case,

    python setup.py sdist

(assuming you haven't specified any `sdist` options in the setup script or config file), `sdist` creates the archive of the default format for the current platform. The default format is a gzip'ed tar file (.tar.gz) on Unix, and ZIP file on Windows. no Mac OS support here

You can specify as many formats as you like using the --formats option, for example:

    python setup.py sdist --formats=gztar,zip

to create a gzipped tarball and a zip file. The available formats are:

Format | Description | Notes
--- | --- | ---
`zip` | zip file (.zip) | (1),(3)
`gztar` | gzip'ed tar file (.tar.gz) | (2),(4)
`bztar` | bzip2'ed tar file (.tar.bz2) | (4)
`ztar` | compressed tar file (.tar.Z) | (4)
`tar` | tar file (.tar) | (4)

Notes:

(1)
  default on Windows
(2)
  default on Unix
(3)
  requires either external zip utility or `zipfile` module (part of the standard Python library since Python 1.6)
(4)
  requires external utilities: tar and possibly one of gzip, bzip2, or compress