What option do I need in setup.py to create the package in the right directory?

Question

I am using setup.py to create a python package, which I want to install via pip. To correctly install the files under

lib/python2.7/site-packages/<package-name>

I used the following option in setup.py:

'package_dir': {'':'lib'}

as described here but get an error

error: package directory 'lib' does not exist

Well, there is no such directory as I want the current directory to be installed as package lib or whatever. I also tried to use

'package_dir': {'mycode':''}

which installes the code directly in

lib/python2.7/site-packages/

and not under

lib/python2.7/site-packages/<package-name>

What am I doing wrong, and where is this documented? I might overlooked the documentation of this basic feature as the documentation for setup.py is 'suboptimal'.

Solution

The description to how to do this an be found in the distribute documentation... Within a directory containing all of the project (TowelStuff/ in the given example) you specify the name of the actual module (towelstuff/). To include this as your module you need to add the following line in setup.py:

'packages': ['towelstuff']

After having created the sdist (from within TowelStuff/), the installation of this package will install it under site-packages/towelstuff, which can be imported as usual (from towelstuff import ...).