PyPI XMLRPC interfaceΒΆ

This document clarifies some aspects of PyPI’s XMLRPC interface, which is used for the conversion.

While PyPI’s metadata is structured, little input validation is performed. E.g. some fields may be None, '' or something bogus such as UNKNOWN (analyzing pypi metadata). E.g. author_email isn’t required to be an email adress.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of descriptions of the output of some of the interface’s commands:

  • release_data:

    • name: the package name. This is not the canonical name. You are required to use this name when requesting info through the interface, not the canonical name.
    • home_page: a URL.
    • license: a string such as GPL, potentially has variations such as General Public License (and bogus values such as LICENSE.txt).
    • summary: short description string
    • description: long description string in reStructuredText format
    • keywords: whitespace separated list of keywords as string
    • classifiers: list of Trove classifiers, list of str.
    • release_url: the PyPI page corresponding to this version
    • package_url: the PyPI page of the latest version of this package
    • docs_url: if the package has hosted its documentation at PyPI, this URL points to it. Submitting documentation to PyPI has been deprecated (in favor of Read the Docs).
    • platform: do not use. It is tied to a version, but not to a download url (release_urls), so it can’t be meaningful. E.g. for numpy it returns Windows while numpy is supported on Linux as well.
    • stable_version: always empty string, useless.
    • requires, requires_dist, provides, provides_dist: seems these are not returned or are always empty

  • release_urls:

    • packagetype:

      Meaning of the most common values:

      • sdist: source distribution
      • bdist_wheel: Python wheel
      • bdist_egg: Python egg, can be converted to a wheel
      • bdist_wininst: ... bdist --format=wininst output, a self-extracting ZIP for Windows; but it can be converted to a wheel

    • python_version: unknown. Examples: source, any, py3, ...

    • url: the download url

    • filename: file name of the download. For a wheel, this follows the wheel file name convention. Eggs also follow a file name convention. Metadata such as which platform the download is for is missing, instead one has to derive it from the filename or download and inspect the binary.