astropy-helpers
===============

This project provides a Python package, ``astropy_helpers``, which includes
many build, installation, and documentation-related tools used by the Astropy
project, but packaged separately for use by other projects that wish to
leverage this work.  The motivation behind this package and details of its
implementation are in the accepted 
`Astropy Proposal for Enhancement (APE) 4 <https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE4.rst>`_.

``astropy_helpers`` includes a special "bootstrap" module called
``ah_bootstrap.py`` which is intended to be used by a project's setup.py in
order to ensure that the ``astropy_helpers`` package is available for
build/installation.  This is similar to the ``ez_setup.py`` module that is
shipped with some projects to bootstrap `setuptools
<https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools>`_.

As described in APE4, the version numbers for ``astropy_helpers`` follow the
corresponding major/minor version of the `astropy core package
<http://www.astropy.org/>`_, but with an independent sequence of micro (bugfix)
version numbers. Hence, the initial release is 0.4, in parallel with Astropy
v0.4, which will be the first version  of Astropy to use ``astropy-helpers``.

For examples of how to implement ``astropy-helpers`` in a project,
see the ``setup.py`` and ``setup.cfg`` files of the 
`Affiliated package template <https://github.com/astropy/package-template>`_.

.. image:: https://travis-ci.org/astropy/astropy-helpers.svg
    :target: https://travis-ci.org/astropy/astropy-helpers

.. image:: https://coveralls.io/repos/astropy/astropy-helpers/badge.svg
    :target: https://coveralls.io/r/astropy/astropy-helpers
