setup.py exclude some python files from bdist

I had the same issue recently (although I had to build a wheel instead of an egg), the solution works the same both for bdist_egg and bdist_wheel. You have to override the method find_package_modules in build_py:

import fnmatchfrom setuptools import find_packages, setupfrom setuptools.command.build_py import build_py as build_py_origexclude = ['*.dev']class build_py(build_py_orig):    def find_package_modules(self, package, package_dir):        modules = super().find_package_modules(package, package_dir)        return [(pkg, mod, file, ) for (pkg, mod, file, ) in modules                if not any(fnmatch.fnmatchcase(pkg + '.' + mod, pat=pattern)                for pattern in exclude)]setup(    packages=find_packages(),    cmdclass={'build_py': build_py},)

In this example, modules named dev in all packages will be excluded from the build.

As you can see, there's no need to play with exclusions in find_packages() as you still need all packages to be included, but instead you filter the module files found in each package. The class build_py is pretty much generic and could be refactored in a separate library if you need to reuse it; the only project-specific stuff is the list of exclude patterns.

def without_app(item):    # http://docs.python.org/release/2.2.1/lib/string-methods.html    return not bool(item.find('app_name') + 1) # help(filter) - use in command line to read the docstringpackages = filter(without_app, find_packages())