Making a PyPI-friendly README¶

README files can help your users understand your project and can be used to set your project’s description on PyPI. This guide helps you create a README in a PyPI-friendly format and include your README in your package so it appears on PyPI.

Creating a README file¶

README files for Python projects are often named README, README.txt, README.rst, or README.md.

For your README to display properly on PyPI, choose a markup language supported by PyPI. Formats supported by PyPI’s README renderer are:

plain text
reStructuredText (without Sphinx extensions)
Markdown (GitHub Flavored Markdown by default, or CommonMark)

It’s customary to save your README file in the root of your project, in the same directory as your pyproject.toml file.

Including your README in your package’s metadata¶

To include your README as your project’s long description on PyPI, declare the readme key in the [project] table of pyproject.toml. Build backends use this value to populate the distribution’s Description and Description-Content-Type core metadata fields.

See also

For Markdown or reStructuredText files, the simplest form is the README path:

[project]
name = "an-example-package"
# other project metadata omitted
readme = "README.md"

When the file name has a recognized .md or .rst extension, the content type is inferred automatically. For another file name or format, provide both the file path and content type explicitly:

[project]
readme = { file = "README", content-type = "text/plain" }

The referenced README should remain in the project source tree so the build backend can read it when producing package metadata.

Validating reStructuredText markup¶

If your README is written in reStructuredText, any invalid markup will prevent it from rendering, causing PyPI to instead just show the README’s raw source.

Note that Sphinx extensions used in docstrings, such as directives and roles (e.g., “:py:func:`getattr`” or “:ref:`my-reference-label`”), are not allowed here and will result in error messages like “Error: Unknown interpreted text role "py:func".”.

You can check your README for markup errors before uploading as follows:

Install or upgrade twine:

Unix/macOS

python3 -m pip install --upgrade twine

Windows

py -m pip install --upgrade twine

Build the sdist and wheel for your project as described under Packaging your project.
Run twine check on the sdist and wheel:
```
twine check dist/*
```
This command will report any problems rendering your README. If your markup renders fine, the command will output Checking distribution FILENAME: Passed.