check-manifest

_ _ _

Are you a Python developer? Have you uploaded packages to the Python Package Index? Have you accidentally uploaded broken packages with some files missing? If so, check-manifest is for you.

Quick start

$ pip install check-manifest

$ cd ~/src/mygreatpackage
$ check-manifest

You can ask the script to help you update your MANIFEST.in:

$ check-manifest -u -v
listing source files under version control: 6 files and directories
building an sdist: check-manifest-0.7.tar.gz: 4 files and directories
lists of files in version control and sdist do not match!
missing from sdist:
  tests.py
  tox.ini
suggested MANIFEST.in rules:
  include *.py
  include tox.ini
updating MANIFEST.in

$ cat MANIFEST.in
include *.rst

# added by check_manifest.py
include *.py
include tox.ini

Command-line reference

$ check-manifest --help
usage: check-manifest [-h] [--version] [-v] [-c] [-u] [-p PYTHON]
                      [--ignore patterns]
                      [source_tree]

Check a Python MANIFEST.in file for completeness

positional arguments:
  source_tree           location for the source tree (default: .)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -v, --verbose         more verbose output (default: False)
  -c, --create          create a MANIFEST.in if missing (default: False)
  -u, --update          append suggestions to MANIFEST.in (implies --create)
                        (default: False)
  -p PYTHON, --python PYTHON
                        use this Python interpreter for running setup.py sdist
                        (default: /home/mg/.venv/bin/python)
  --ignore patterns     ignore files/directories matching these comma-
                        separated patterns (default: None)
  --ignore-bad-ideas patterns
                        ignore bad idea files/directories matching these
                        comma-separated patterns (default: [])

Configuration

You can configure check-manifest to ignore certain file patterns using a [tool.check-manifest] section in your pyproject.toml file or a [check-manifest] section in either setup.cfg or tox.ini. Examples::

# pyproject.toml [tool.check-manifest] ignore = [".travis.yml"]

# setup.cfg or tox.ini [check-manifest] ignore = .travis.yml

Note that lists are newline separated in the setup.cfg and tox.ini files.

The following options are recognized:

ignore A list of filename patterns that will be ignored by check-manifest. Use this if you want to keep files in your version control system that shouldn't be included in your source distributions. The default ignore list is ::

PKG-INFO .egg-info .egg-info/ setup.cfg .hgtags .hgsigs .hgignore .gitignore .bzrignore .gitattributes .github/ .travis.yml Jenkinsfile *.mo

ignore-default-rules If set to true, your ignore patterns will replace the default ignore list instead of adding to it.

ignore-bad-ideas A list of filename patterns that will be ignored by check-manifest's generated files check. Use this if you want to keep generated files in your version control system, even though it is generally a bad idea.

Version control integration

With pre-commit, check-manifest can be part of your git-workflow. Add the following to your .pre-commit-config.yaml.

repos:
-   repo: https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest
    rev: "0.51"
    hooks:
    -   id: check-manifest

If you are running pre-commit without a network, you can utilize args: [--no-build-isolation] to prevent a pip install reaching out to PyPI. This makes python -m build ignore your build-system.requires, so you'll want to list them all in additional_dependencies.

repos:
-   repo: https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest
    rev: "0.51"
    hooks:
    -   id: check-manifest
        args: [--no-build-isolation]
        additional_dependencies: [setuptools, wheel, setuptools-scm]

Changelog

0.51 (2025-10-15)

• Add Python 3.14 support.
• Drop Python 3.7 support.

0.50 (2024-10-09)

• Add Python 3.12 and 3.13 support.

0.49 (2022-12-05)

• Add Python 3.11 support.

• Drop Python 3.6 support.

• Exclude more common dev/test files.

0.48 (2022-03-13)

• Add Python 3.10 support.

• Switch to tomli instead of toml, after hearing about PEP-680. tomli will be

included in the Python 3.11 standard library as tomllib, while toml is apparently unmaintained.

• Fix submodule support when .gitmodules exists in a subdirectory

(#153). Note that this reverts a fix for #124: git versions before 2.11 are no longer supported.

0.47 (2021-09-22)

• Fix setuptools_scm workaround for packages with dashes in the name

(#145).

0.46 (2021-01-04)

• The pre-commit_ hook now always uses Python 3.

0.45 (2020-10-31)

• Add Python 3.9 support.

• Drop Python 3.5 support.

• Switch from pep517 to python-build_ (

#128_).

• Add --no-build-isolation option so check-manifest can succeed building

pep517-based distributions without an internet connection. With --no-build-isolation, you must preinstall the build-system.requires beforehand. (#128_).

0.44 (2020-10-03)

• Try to avoid passing --recurse-submodules to git ls if the project

doesn't use git submodules (i.e. doesn't have a .gitsubmodules file). This should make check-manifest work again with older git versions, as long as you don't use submodules (#124_).

0.43 (2020-09-21)

• Fix collecting files versioned by git when a project has submodules and

GIT_INDEX_FILE is set. This bug was triggered when check-manifest was run as part of a git hook ( #122_, #123_).

Note: check-manifest 0.43 requires git version 2.11 or later.

0.42 (2020-05-03)

• Added -q/--quiet command line argument. This will reduce the verbosity

of informational output, e.g. for use in a CI pipeline.

• Rewrote the ignore logic to be more compatible with setuptools. This might

have introduced some regressions, so please file bugs! One side effect of this is that --ignore (or the ignore setting in the config file) is now handled the same way as global-exclude in a MANIFEST.in, which means:

• it's matched anywhere in the file tree
• it's ignored if it matches a directory

You can ignore directories only by ignoring every file inside it. You can use --ignore=dir/** to do that.

This decision is not cast in stone: I may in the future change the handling of --ignore to match files and directories, because there's no reason it has to be setuptools-compatible.

• Drop Python 2.7 support.

0.41 (2020-02-25)

• Support PEP 517_, i.e. packages using pyproject.toml instead of a setup.py

(#105).

• Ignore subcommand stderr unless the subcommand fails. This avoids treating

warning messages as filenames. (#110.)

0.40 (2019-10-15)

• Add Python 3.8 support.

0.39 (2019-06-06)

• You can now use check-manifest as a pre-commit

hook (#100_).

0.38 (2019-04-23)

• Add Python 3.7 support.

• Drop Python 3.4 support.

• Added GitHub templates to default ignore patterns.

• Added reading check-manifest config out of tox.ini or pyproject.toml.

0.37 (2018-04-12)

• Drop Python 3.3 support.

• Support packages using setuptools_scm

(#68_).

Note that setuptools_scm usually makes MANIFEST.in files obsolete. Having one is helpful only if you intend to build an sdist and then use that sdist to perform further builds, instead of building from a source checkout.

0.36 (2017-11-21)

• Handle empty VCS repositories more gracefully

(#84_).

0.35 (2017-01-30)

• Python 3.6 support.

0.34 (2016-09-14)

• Fix WindowsError due to presence of read-only files

(#74_).

0.33 (2016-08-29)

• Fix WindowsError due to git submodules in subdirectories

(#73_). Contributed by Loren Gordon.

0.32 (2016-08-16)

• New config/command line option to ignore bad ideas (ignore-bad-ideas)

(issue #67_). Contributed by Brecht Machiels.

• Files named .hgsigs are ignored by default. Contributed by Jakub Wilk.

0.31 (2016-01-28)

• Drop Python 3.2 support.

• Ignore commented-out lines in MANIFEST.in

(issue #66_).

0.30 (2015-12-10)

• Support git submodules

(issue #61_).

• Revert the zc.buildout support hack from 0.26 because it causes breakage

(issue #56_).

• Improve non-ASCII filename handling with Bazaar on Windows.

0.29 (2015-11-21)

• Fix --python with just a command name, to be found in path (`issue #57

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/57>`__).

0.28 (2015-11-11)

• Fix detection of git repositories when .git is a file and not a directory (`#53

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/pull/53>`__). One situation where this occurs is when the project is checked out as a git submodule.

• Apply ignore patterns in subdirectories too (`#54

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/54>`__).

0.27 (2015-11-02)

• Fix utter breakage on Windows, introduced in 0.26 (`issue #52

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/52>`__). (The bug -- clearing the environment unnecessarily -- could probably also cause locale-related problems on other OSes.)

0.26 (2015-10-30)

• Do not complain about missing .gitattributes file (`PR #50

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/pull/50>`__).

• Normalize unicode representation and case of filenames. (`issue #47

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/47>`__).

• Support installation via zc.buildout better (`issue #35

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/35>`__).

• Drop Python 2.6 support because one of our test dependencies (mock) dropped

it. This also means we no longer use environment markers.

0.25 (2015-05-27)

• Stop dynamic computation of install_requires in setup.py: this doesn't work

well in the presence of the pip 7 wheel cache. Use PEP-426 environment markers instead (this means we now require setuptools >= 0.7, and pip >= 6.0, and wheel >= 0.24).

0.24 (2015-03-26)

• Make sure setup.py not being added to the VCS doesn't cause

hard-to-understand errors (issue #46_).

0.23 (2015-02-12)

• More reliable svn status parsing; now handles svn externals (`issue #45

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/45>`__).

• The test suite now skips tests for version control systems that aren't

installed (issue #42_).

0.22 (2014-12-23)

• More terse output by default; use the new -v (--verbose) flag

to see all the details.

• Warn the user if MANIFEST.in is missing (`issue #31

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/31>`__).

• Fix IOError when files listed under version control are missing (`issue #32

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/32>`__).

• Improved wording of the match/do not match messages (`issue #34

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/34>`__).

• Handle a relative --python path (`issue #36

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/36>`__).

• Warn about leading and trailing slashes in MANIFEST.in (`issue #37

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/37>`__).

• Ignore .travis.yml by default (`issue #39

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/39>`__).

• Suggest a rule for Makefile found deeper in the source tree.

0.21 (2014-06-13)

• Don't drop setup.cfg when copying version-controlled files into a clean

temporary directory (issue #29_).

0.20 (2014-05-14)

• Restore warning about files included in the sdist but not added to the

version control system (issue #27_).

• Fix check-manifest relative/pathname (`issue #28

<https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest/issues/28>`__).

0.19 (2014-02-09)

• More correct MANIFEST.in parsing for exclusion rules.
• Some effort was expended towards Windows compatibility.
• Handles non-ASCII filenames, as long as they're valid in your locale

(issue #23_, #25_).

0.18 (2014-01-30)

• Friendlier error message when an external command cannot be found

(issue #21_).

• Add suggestion pattern for .coveragerc.
• Python 2.6 support

(issue #22_).

0.17 (2013-10-10)

• Read the existing MANIFEST.in file for files to ignore

(issue #19_).

0.16 (2013-10-01)

• Fix Subversion status parsing in the presence of svn usernames longer than 12

characters (issue #18_).

0.15 (2013-09-20)

• Normalize the paths of all files, avoiding some duplicate misses of

directories. (issue #16_). [maurits]

0.14 (2013-08-28)

• Supports packages that do not live in the root of a version control

repository (issue #15_).

• More reliable svn support: detect files that have been added but not

committed (or committed but not updated).

• Licence changed from GPL (v2 or later) to MIT

(issue #12_).

0.13 (2013-07-31)

• New command line option: --ignore

(issue #11_). Contributed by Steven Myint.

• New command line option: -p, --python. Defaults to the Python you used to

run check-manifest. Fixes issues with packages that require Python 3 to run setup.py (issue #13_).

0.12 (2013-05-15)

• Add suggestion pattern for Makefile.

• More generic suggestion patterns, should cover almost anything.

• zest.releaser_ integration: skip check-release for non-Python packages

(issue #9_).

0.11 (2013-03-20)

• Make sure MANIFEST.in is not ignored even if it hasn't been added to the

VCS yet (issue #7_).

0.10 (2013-03-17)

• check-manifest --version now prints the version number.

• Don't apologize for not adding rules for directories (especially after adding

rules that include files inside that directory).

• Python 3 support contributed by Steven Myint.

• Default ignore patterns can be configured in setup.cfg

(issue #3).

0.9 (2013-03-06)

• Add suggestion pattern for .travis.yml.

• When check-manifest -u (or -c) doesn't know how to write a rule matching a

particular file, it now apologizes explicitly.

• Copy the source tree to a temporary directory before running python setup.py

sdist to avoid side effects from setuptools plugins or stale \*.egg-info/SOURCES.txt files (issue #1).

• Warn if *.egg-info or *.mo is actually checked into the VCS.

• Don't complain if *.mo files are present in the sdist but not in the VCS

(issue #2).

0.8 (2013-03-06)

• Entry point for zest.releaser_. If you install both zest.releaser and

check-manifest, you will be asked if you want to check your manifest during fullrelease.

0.7 (2013-03-05)

• First release available from the Python Package Index.

• Moved from https://gist.github.com/4277075

to https://github.com/mgedmin/check-manifest

• Added README.rst, CHANGES.rst, setup.py, tox.ini (but no real tests yet),

MANIFEST.in, and a Makefile.

• Fixed a bug in error reporting (when setup.py failed, the user would get

TypeError: descriptor '__init__' requires an 'exceptions.Exception' object but received a 'str').