In order to add website files into a Flask application using setuptools, I needed to recurse down several directories and grab HTML and CSS files.

This Python tip will show you how to get a list of files recursively.

First in order to solve this problem, we’re going to recursively get a list of directories.

from glob import glob
directories = glob('/path/to/directory/**/', recursive=True)

Now we will go in each directory and grab the files,

data_files = []
for directory in directories:
    data_files += list(filter(lambda x: x + '/'  not in directories, glob(directory + '*')))

For setuptools, you would want the data_files variable to be a list of tuples with module names and the files associated with them.

Complete script:

data_files = []
directories = glob('path/to/files/**/', recursive=True)
for directory in directories:
    files = list(filter(lambda x: x + '/' not in directories, glob(directory + "*")))
    data_files.append((directory, files))

For setuptools don’t forget to include_package_data!