Packaging Guidelines

Downstream packagers often want to package Hypothesis. Here are some guidelines.

The primary guideline is this: If you are not prepared to keep up with the Hypothesis release schedule, don’t. You will annoy me and are doing your users a disservice.

Hypothesis has a very frequent release schedule. It’s rare that it goes a week without a release, and there are often multiple releases in a given week.

If you are prepared to keep up with this schedule, you might find the rest of this document useful.

Release tarballs

These are available from the GitHub releases page. The tarballs on PyPI are intended for installation from a Python tool such as pip and should not be considered complete releases. Requests to include additional files in them will not be granted. Their absence is not a bug.


Python versions

Hypothesis is designed to work with a range of Python versions. We always support all versisions of CPython with upstream support, and plan to drop Python 2 at EOL in 2020. We also support the latest versions of PyPy for Python 3, and for Python 2 until the CPython 2 EOL.

If you feel the need to have separate Python 3 and Python 2 packages you can, but Hypothesis works unmodified on either.

Other Python libraries

Hypothesis has mandatory dependencies on the following libraries:

Hypothesis has optional dependencies on the following libraries:

  • pytz (almost any version should work)
  • Django, all supported versions
  • numpy, 1.10 or later (earlier versions will probably work fine)
  • pandas, 1.19 or later
  • pytest (3.0 or greater). This is a mandatory dependency for testing Hypothesis itself but optional for users.

The way this works when installing Hypothesis normally is that these features become available if the relevant library is installed.

Testing Hypothesis

If you want to test Hypothesis as part of your packaging you will probably not want to use the mechanisms Hypothesis itself uses for running its tests, because it has a lot of logic for installing and testing against different versions of Python.

The tests must be run with pytest >= 3.0; check the requirements/ directory for details.

The organisation of the tests is described in the hypothesis-python/tests/README.rst.