Is there a way to extract project metadata without Pip-installing it?

Question

I am developing a project using Setuptools, and in a couple of places (e.g. scripts, the Sphinx docs) I want to be able to use pieces of project metadata, such as the version, name, authors, etc. I want to avoid hard-coding these values, as they are all subject to change.

I am using pyproject.toml to define metadata containing some dynamic values, and I also have a setup.py that builds some Cython extensions.

I am aware that importlib.metadata gives you access to metadata of installed distributions, but for team-specific reasons I cannot necessarily assume that my project is installed into any particular environment.

I also want to avoid manually parsing pyproject.toml and ad-hoc reimplementing the Setuptools logic.

Does Setuptools have a stable Python API for this purpose?

Ideally I would be able to pass a directory (maybe just '.') to some function, and get a distutils.core.Distribution that I can work with and get information from, which contains the metadata extracted from pyproject.toml, setup.cfg, and/or setup.py.