Welcome to twine’s documentation!

Twine user documentation

Twine is a utility for publishing Python packages on PyPI.

It provides build system independent uploads of source and binary distribution artifacts for both new and existing projects.

Why Should I Use This?

The goal of twine is to improve PyPI interaction by improving security and testability.

The biggest reason to use twine is that it securely authenticates you to PyPI over HTTPS using a verified connection regardless of the underlying Python version, while whether or not python setup.py upload will work correctly and securely depends on your build system, your Python version and the underlying operating system.

Secondly, it allows you to precreate your distribution files. python setup.py upload only allows you to upload something that you’re building with distutils or setuptools, and created in the same command invocation. This means that you cannot test the exact file you’re going to upload to PyPI to ensure that it works before uploading it.

Finally, twine allows you to pre-sign your files and pass the .asc files into the command line invocation (twine upload myproject-1.0.1.tar.gz myproject-1.0.1.tar.gz.asc). This enables you to be assured that you’re typing your gpg passphrase into gpg itself and not anything else, since you will be the one directly executing gpg --detach-sign -a <filename>.

Features

  • Verified HTTPS connections
  • Uploading doesn’t require executing setup.py
  • Uploading files that have already been created, allowing testing of distributions before release
  • Supports uploading any packaging format (including wheels)

Installation

$ pip install twine

Using Twine

  1. Create some distributions in the normal way:

    $ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

  2. Upload with twine to Test PyPI and verify things look right. Twine will automatically prompt for your username and password:

    $ twine upload --repository-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ dist/*
username: ...
password:
...

  3. Upload to PyPI:

    $ twine upload dist/*

  4. Done!

More documentation on using twine to upload packages to PyPI is in the Python Packaging User Guide.

Keyring Support

Instead of typing in your password every time you upload a distribution, Twine allows you to store your username and password securely using keyring.

To use the keyring, you must first install the keyring packages:

  • On Windows and MacOS you just need to install keyring, for example, pip install --user keyring.
  • On Linux, in addition to the keyring package you also need to ensure the python3-dbus system package is installed. For example, apt install python3-dbus. See Keyring’s installation instructions for more details.

Once keyring is installed you can use the keyring program to set your username and password to use for each package index (repository) you want to upload to using Twine.

To set your username and password for test PyPI run the following command. keyring will prompt you for your password:

$ keyring set https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ your-username
# or
$ python3 -m keyring set https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ your-username

To set your username and password for PyPI run this command, again, keyring will prompt for the password:

$ keyring set https://upload.pypi.org/legacy/ your-username
# or
$ python3 -m keyring set https://upload.pypi.org/legacy/ your-username

The next time you run twine it will prompt you for a username and will grab the appropriate password from the keyring.

Note

If you are using Linux in a headless environment (such as on a server) you’ll need to do some additional steps to ensure that Keyring can store secrets securely. See Using Keyring on headless systems.

Disabling Keyring

In some cases, the presence of keyring may be problematic. To disable keyring and defer to a prompt for passwords, uninstall keyring or if that’s not an option, you can also configure keyring to be disabled.

See twine 338 for a discussion on ways to do that.

Options

twine upload

Uploads one or more distributions to a repository.

$ twine upload -h

usage: twine upload [-h] [-r REPOSITORY] [--repository-url REPOSITORY_URL]
                    [-s] [--sign-with SIGN_WITH] [-i IDENTITY] [-u USERNAME]
                    [-p PASSWORD] [-c COMMENT] [--config-file CONFIG_FILE]
                    [--skip-existing] [--cert path] [--client-cert path]
                    [--verbose] [--disable-progress-bar]
                    dist [dist ...]

positional arguments:
  dist                  The distribution files to upload to the repository
                        (package index). Usually dist/* . May additionally
                        contain a .asc file to include an existing signature
                        with the file upload.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r REPOSITORY, --repository REPOSITORY
                        The repository (package index) to upload the package
                        to. Should be a section in the config file (default:
                        pypi). (Can also be set via TWINE_REPOSITORY
                        environment variable.)
  --repository-url REPOSITORY_URL
                        The repository (package index) URL to upload the
                        package to. This overrides --repository. (Can also be
                        set via TWINE_REPOSITORY_URL environment variable.)
  -s, --sign            Sign files to upload using GPG.
  --sign-with SIGN_WITH
                        GPG program used to sign uploads (default: gpg).
  -i IDENTITY, --identity IDENTITY
                        GPG identity used to sign files.
  -u USERNAME, --username USERNAME
                        The username to authenticate to the repository
                        (package index) as. (Can also be set via
                        TWINE_USERNAME environment variable.)
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        The password to authenticate to the repository
                        (package index) with. (Can also be set via
                        TWINE_PASSWORD environment variable.)
  -c COMMENT, --comment COMMENT
                        The comment to include with the distribution file.
  --config-file CONFIG_FILE
                        The .pypirc config file to use.
  --skip-existing       Continue uploading files if one already exists. (Only
                        valid when uploading to PyPI. Other implementations
                        may not support this.)
  --cert path           Path to alternate CA bundle (can also be set via
                        TWINE_CERT environment variable).
  --client-cert path    Path to SSL client certificate, a single file
                        containing the private key and the certificate in PEM
                        format.
  --verbose             Show verbose output.
  --disable-progress-bar
                        Disable the progress bar.

twine check

Checks whether your distributions long description will render correctly on PyPI.

$ twine check -h
usage: twine check [-h] dist [dist ...]

positional arguments:
dist        The distribution files to check, usually dist/*

optional arguments:
-h, --help  show this help message and exit

twine register

WARNING: The register command is no longer necessary if you are uploading to pypi.org. As such, it is no longer supported in Warehouse (the new PyPI software running on pypi.org). However, you may need this if you are using a different package index.

For completeness, its usage:

$ twine register -h

usage: twine register [-h] -r REPOSITORY [--repository-url REPOSITORY_URL]
                      [-u USERNAME] [-p PASSWORD] [-c COMMENT]
                      [--config-file CONFIG_FILE] [--cert path]
                      [--client-cert path]
                      package

positional arguments:
  package               File from which we read the package metadata.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r REPOSITORY, --repository REPOSITORY
                        The repository (package index) to register the package
                        to. Should be a section in the config file. (Can also
                        be set via TWINE_REPOSITORY environment variable.)
                        Initial package registration no longer necessary on
                        pypi.org:
                        https://packaging.python.org/guides/migrating-to-pypi-
                        org/
  --repository-url REPOSITORY_URL
                        The repository (package index) URL to register the
                        package to. This overrides --repository. (Can also be
                        set via TWINE_REPOSITORY_URL environment variable.)
  -u USERNAME, --username USERNAME
                        The username to authenticate to the repository
                        (package index) as. (Can also be set via
                        TWINE_USERNAME environment variable.)
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        The password to authenticate to the repository
                        (package index) with. (Can also be set via
                        TWINE_PASSWORD environment variable.)
  -c COMMENT, --comment COMMENT
                        The comment to include with the distribution file.
  --config-file CONFIG_FILE
                        The .pypirc config file to use.
  --cert path           Path to alternate CA bundle (can also be set via
                        TWINE_CERT environment variable).
  --client-cert path    Path to SSL client certificate, a single file
                        containing the private key and the certificate in PEM
                        format.

Environment Variables

Twine also supports configuration via environment variables. Options passed on the command line will take precedence over options set via environment variables. Definition via environment variable is helpful in environments where it is not convenient to create a .pypirc file, such as a CI/build server, for example.

  • TWINE_USERNAME - the username to use for authentication to the repository.
  • TWINE_PASSWORD - the password to use for authentication to the repository.
  • TWINE_REPOSITORY - the repository configuration, either defined as a section in .pypirc or provided as a full URL.
  • TWINE_REPOSITORY_URL - the repository URL to use.
  • TWINE_CERT - custom CA certificate to use for repositories with self-signed or untrusted certificates.

Resources

Contributing

See our developer documentation for how to get started, an architectural overview, and our future development plans.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the twine project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the PyPA Code of Conduct.

Contributing

We are happy you have decided to contribute to twine.

Please see the GitHub repository for code and more documentation, and the official Python Packaging User Guide for user documentation. You can also join #pypa or #pypa-dev on Freenode, or the pypa-dev mailing list, to ask questions or get involved.

Getting started

We recommend you use a development environment. Using a virtualenv keeps your development environment isolated, so twine and its dependencies do not interfere with other packages installed on your machine. You can use virtualenv or pipenv to isolate your development environment.

Clone the twine repository from GitHub, and then make and activate a virtual environment that uses Python 3.6 as the default Python. Example:

mkvirtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.6 twine

Then, run the following command:

pip install -e /path/to/your/local/twine

Now, in your virtual environment, twine is pointing at your local copy, so when you make changes, you can easily see their effect.

Building the documentation

Additions and edits to twine’s documentation are welcome and appreciated.

We use tox to build docs. Activate your virtual environment, then install tox.

pip install tox

If you are using pipenv to manage your virtual environment, you may need the tox-pipenv plugin so that tox can use pipenv environments instead of virtualenvs.

After making docs changes, lint and build the docs locally, using tox, before making a pull request. Activate your virtual environment, then, in the root directory, run:

tox -e docs

The HTML of the docs will be visible in twine/docs/_build/.

Testing

Tests with twine are run using tox, and tested against the following Python versions: 2.7, 3.4, 3,5, and 3.6. To run these tests locally, you will need to have these versions of Python installed on your machine.

Either use tox to build against all supported Python versions (if you have them installed) or use tox -e py{version} to test against a specific version, e.g., tox -e py27 or tox -e py34.

Also, always run tox -e lint before submitting a pull request.

Submitting changes
  1. Fork the GitHub repository.
  2. Make a branch off of master and commit your changes to it.
  3. Run the tests with tox and lint any docs changes with tox -e docs.
  4. Ensure that your name is added to the end of the AUTHORS file using the format Name <email@domain.com> (url), where the (url) portion is optional.
  5. Submit a pull request to the master branch on GitHub.

Architectural overview

Twine is a command-line tool for interacting with PyPI securely over HTTPS. Its three purposes are to be:

  1. A user-facing tool for publishing on pypi.org
  2. A user-facing tool for publishing on other Python package indexes (e.g., devpi instances)
  3. A useful API for other programs (e.g., zest.releaser) to call for publishing on any Python package index

Currently, twine has two principal functions: uploading new packages and registering new projects (register is no longer supported on PyPI, and is in Twine for use with other package indexes).

Its command line arguments are parsed in twine/cli.py. The code for registering new projects is in twine/commands/register.py, and the code for uploading is in twine/commands/upload.py. The file twine/package.py contains a single class, PackageFile, which hashes the project files and extracts their metadata. The file twine/repository.py contains the Repository class, whose methods control the URL the package is uploaded to (which the user can specify either as a default, in the .pypirc file, or pass on the command line), and the methods that upload the package securely to a URL.

Where Twine gets configuration and credentials

A user can set the repository URL, username, and/or password via command line, .pypirc files, environment variables, and keyring.

Adding a maintainer

A checklist for adding a new maintainer to the project.

  1. Add her as a Member in the GitHub repo settings. (This will also give her privileges on the Travis CI project.)
  2. Get her Test PyPI and canon PyPI usernames and add her as a Maintainer on our Test PyPI project and canon PyPI.

Making a new release

A checklist for creating, testing, and distributing a new version.

  1. Choose a version number, e.g., “1.15.”

  2. Merge the last planned PR before the new release:

    1. Add new changes to docs/changelog.rst.
    2. Update the __version__ string in twine/__init__.py, which is where setup.py pulls it from, with {number}rc1 for “release candidate 1”.
    3. Update copyright dates.

  3. Run Twine tests:

    1. tox -e py{27,34,35,36,py}
    2. tox -e lint for the linter
    3. tox -e docs (this checks the Sphinx docs and uses readme_renderer to check that the long_description and other metadata will render fine on the PyPI description)

  4. Run integration tests with downstreams:

    1. Test pypiserver support:

      git clone git@github.com:pypiserver/pypiserver
cd pypiserver
tox -e pre_twine

    2. Create a test package to upload to Test PyPI, version-control it with git, and test zest.releaser per directions in this comment.

    3. Test devpi support:

      pip install devpi-client
devpi use https://m.devpi.net
devpi user -c {username} password={password}
devpi login {username} --password={password}
devpi index -c testpypi type=mirror mirror_url=https://test.pypi.org/simple/
devpi use {username}/testpypi
python setup.py sdist
twine upload --repository-url https://m.devpi.net/{username}/testpypi/ dist/{testpackage}.tar.gz

  5. Create a git tag with git tag -sam 'Release v{number}' {number}.

    • {number}, such as 1.15.1rc1
    • -s signs it with your PGP key
    • -a creates an annotated tag for GitHub
    • -m adds the message; optional if you want to compose a longer message

  6. View your tag: git tag -v {number}

  7. Push your tag: git push upstream {number}.

  8. Delete old distributions: rm dist/*.

  9. Create distributions with python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel.

  10. Set your TestPyPI and canon PyPI credentials in your session with keyring (docs forthcoming).

  11. Upload to Test PyPI: twine upload --repository-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ --skip-existing dist/*

  12. Verify that everything looks good, downloads ok, etc. Make needed fixes.

  13. Merge the last PR before the new release:

    1. Add new changes and new release to docs/changelog.rst, with the new version {number}, this time without the rc1 suffix.
    2. Update the __version__ string in twine/__init__.py with {number}.

  14. Run tests again. Check the changelog to verify that it looks right.

  15. Create a new git tag with git tag -sam 'Release v{number}' {number}.

  16. View your tag: git tag -v {number}

  17. Push your tag: git push upstream {number}.

  18. Delete old distributions: rm dist/*.

  19. Create distributions with python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel.

  20. On a Monday or Tuesday, upload to canon PyPI: twine upload --skip-existing dist/*

    Note

    Will be replaced by tox -e release at some point.

  21. Send announcement email to pypa-dev mailing list and celebrate.

Future development

See our open issues.

In the future, pip and twine may merge into a single tool; see ongoing discussion.

Changelog

1.13.0 2019-02-13

  • [Feature] #418: Support keyring.get_username_and_password.
  • [Feature] #419: Support keyring.get_credential.
  • [Feature] #426: Allow defining an empty username and password in .pypirc.
  • [Feature] #427: Add disable_progress_bar option to disable tqdm.
  • [Support] #439: Refactor tox env and travis config.

1.12.1 2018-09-24

  • [Bug] #404: Fix regression with upload exit code

1.12.0 2018-09-24

  • [Feature] #363: Empower --skip-existing for Artifactory repositories
  • [Feature] #392: Drop support for Python 3.3
  • [Feature] #395: Add twine check command to check long description

1.11.0 2018-03-19

  • [Feature] #319: Support Metadata 2.1 (PEP 566), including Markdown for description fields.
  • [Feature] #320: Remove PyPI as default register package index.
  • [Bug] #322: Raise exception if attempting upload to deprecated legacy PyPI URLs.
  • [Bug] #269: Avoid uploading to PyPI when given alternate repository URL, and require http:// or https:// in repository_url.
  • [Support] #318: Update PyPI URLs.
  • [Support] #314: Add new maintainer, release checklists.
  • [Support] #277: Add instructions on how to use keyring.

1.10.0 2018-03-07

  • [Feature] #256: Improve progressbar
  • [Feature] #257: Declare support for Python 3.6
  • [Feature] #303: Revise docs predicting future of twine
  • [Feature] #296: Add architecture overview to docs
  • [Feature] #295: Add doc building instructions
  • [Feature] #46: Link to changelog from README
  • [Feature] #304: Reorganize & improve user & developer documentation.
  • [Bug] #265: Fix --repository[-url] help text
  • [Bug] #268: Print progress to stdout, not stderr
  • [Bug] #297: Fix Read the Docs, tox, Travis configuration
  • [Bug] #286: Fix Travis CI and test configuration
  • [Bug] #200: Remove obsolete registration guidance
  • [Bug] #299: Fix changelog formatting
  • [Bug] #298: Fix syntax highlighting in README
  • [Bug] #315: Degrade gracefully when keyring is unavailable

1.9.1 2017-05-27

  • [Bug]: Blacklist known bad versions of Requests. See also [Bug] #253:

1.9.0 2017-05-22

  • [Support]: Check if a package exists if the URL is one of:

    • https://pypi.python.org/pypi/
    • https://upload.pypi.org/
    • https://upload.pypi.io/

    This helps people with https://upload.pypi.io still in their .pypirc file.

  • [Support]: Fix precedence of --repository-url over --repository. See also [Bug] #206:

  • [Support]: Fix --skip-existing when used to upload a package for the first time. See also [Bug] #220:

  • [Support]: Twine sends less information about the user’s system in the User-Agent string. See also [Bug] #229:

  • [Support]: Twine will use hashlib.blake2b on Python 3.6+ instead of using pyblake2 for Blake2 hashes 256 bit hashes.

  • [Support]: Twine will now resolve passwords using the keyring if available. Module can be required with the keyring extra.

1.8.0 2016-08-08

  • [Feature] #171: Generate Blake2b 256 digests for packages if pyblake2 is installed. Users can use python -m pip install twine[with-blake2] to have pyblake2 installed with Twine.

  • [Feature] #166: Allow the Repository URL to be provided on the command-line (--repository-url) or via an environment variable (TWINE_REPOSITORY_URL).

  • [Feature] #144: Retrieve configuration from the environment as a default.

    • Repository URL will default to TWINE_REPOSITORY
    • Username will default to TWINE_USERNAME
    • Password will default to TWINE_PASSWORD

  • [Feature] #201: Switch from upload.pypi.io to upload.pypi.org.

  • [Support]: Do not generate traffic to Legacy PyPI unless we’re uploading to it or uploading to Warehouse (e.g., pypi.io). This avoids the attempt to upload a package to the index if we can find it on Legacy PyPI already.

  • [Support]: Warn users if they receive a 500 error when uploading to *pypi.python.org

  • [Support]: Stop testing on Python 2.6. 2.6 support will be “best effort” until 2.0.0

  • [Support]: Generate SHA256 digest for all packages by default.

1.7.4 2016-07-09

  • [Bug]: Correct a packaging error.

1.7.3 2016-07-08

  • [Bug] #195: Fix uploads to instances of pypiserver using --skip-existing. We were not properly checking the return status code on the response after attempting an upload.

1.7.2 2016-07-05

  • [Bug] #189:, [Bug] #191: Fix issue where we were checking the existence of packages even if the user didn’t specify --skip-existing.

1.7.1 2016-07-05

  • [Bug] #187: Clint was not specified in the wheel metadata as a dependency.

1.7.0 2016-07-04

  • [Feature] #177: Switch Twine to upload to pypi.io instead of pypi.python.org.
  • [Feature] #167: Implement retries when the CDN in front of PyPI gives us a 5xx error.
  • [Feature] #162: Allow --skip-existing to work for 409 status codes.
  • [Feature] #152: Add progress bar to uploads.
  • [Feature] #142: Support --cert and --client-cert command-line flags and config file options for feature parity with pip. This allows users to verify connections to servers other than PyPI (e.g., local package repositories) with different certificates.
  • [Bug] #186: Allow passwords to have %s in them.

1.6.5 2015-12-16

  • [Bug] #155: Bump requests-toolbelt version to ensure we avoid ConnectionErrors

1.6.4 2015-10-27

  • [Bug] #146: Exception while accessing the respository key (sic) when raising a redirect exception.
  • [Bug] #145: Paths with hyphens in them break the Wheel regular expression.

1.6.3 2015-10-05

  • [Bug] #137:, [Bug] #140: Uploading signatures was broken due to the pull request that added large file support via requests-toolbelt. This caused a 500 error on PyPI and prevented package and signature upload in twine 1.6.0

1.6.2 2015-09-28

  • [Bug] #132: Upload signatures with packages appropriately

    As part of the refactor for the 1.6.0 release, we were using the wrong name to find the signature file.

    This also uncovered a bug where if you’re using twine in a situation where * is not expanded by your shell, we might also miss uploading signatures to PyPI. Both were fixed as part of this.

1.6.1 2015-09-18

  • [Bug] #130: Fix signing support for uploads

1.6.0 2015-09-14

  • [Feature] #8: Support registering new packages with twine register
  • [Feature] #115: Add the --skip-existing flag to twine upload to allow users to skip releases that already exist on PyPI.
  • [Feature] #97: Allow the user to specify the location of their .pypirc
  • [Feature] #104: Large file support via the requests-toolbelt
  • [Feature] #106: Upload wheels first to PyPI
  • [Bug] #111: Provide more helpful messages if .pypirc is out of date.
  • [Bug] #116: Work around problems with Windows when using getpass.getpass
  • [Bug] #114: Warnings triggered by pkginfo searching for PKG-INFO files should no longer be user visible.
  • [Bug] #92: Raise an exception on redirects

1.5.0 2015-03-10

  • [Feature] #29: Support commands not named “gpg” for signing
  • [Bug] #61: Support deprecated pypirc file format
  • [Bug] #85: Display information about the version of setuptools installed
  • [Support]: Add lower-limit to requests dependency

1.4.0 2014-12-12

  • [Feature] #6: Switch to a git style dispatching for the commands to enable simpler commands and programmatic invocation.
  • [Feature] #13: Parse ~/.pypirc ourselves and use subprocess instead of the distutils.spawn module.
  • [Bug] #65: Expand globs and check for existence of dists to upload
  • [Bug] #26: Add support for uploading Windows installers
  • [Bug] #47: Fix issue uploading packages with _s in the name
  • [Bug] #32: Use pkg_resources to load registered commands
  • [Bug] #34: List registered commands in help text
  • [Bug] #28: Prevent ResourceWarning from being shown

1.3.0 2014-03-31

  • [Feature]: Additional functionality.

1.2.2 2013-10-03

  • [Feature]: Basic functionality.