What is Python Egg?

(Attention: This is a  technical post  for Python developers. If you are not python programmer you might want to skip this).

An .egg format files in Python is the standard distribution package contains the files used for installation. It can be correlated with .jar in Core Java and .zip for windows archive folder where all the related files are placed at single location.

A new alternative of .egg files are .whl file (wheel files), The .egg format was introduced by setuptools in 2004, and the new wheel format was introduced by pep 427 in year 2012.

"An.egg file is normally a .zip file in Windows. Just change the extension of .egg file to .zip, we can see the folders and python files available in it"

To create an .egg file is simple from setup tools. Create a file setup.py file with below content, Here is the code snipped which generate the  myDisributionPackage.egg file for Mypackage

from setup tools import setup, find_packages

setup (name = "myDisributionPackage", version = "1.0", packages = find_packages(),author='JatinSir')

In a cmd terminal run the following: python setup.py bdist_egg

This will generate the folder dist which has the file myDisributionPackage-1.0-py2.7.egg.