Month: April 2007

When you’ve got a big python application, you’ll usually split it up in modules. One big annoyance I’ve had is that a module inside a directory cannot (easily) import a module higher up in the tree. Eg: drawers/gtk.py cannot import state/bla.py.

This is usually solved by making the application a package. This allows for import myapp.drawers.gtk from everywhere inside your application. To make it a package though, you need to add the parent directory in the sys.path list. But unfortunately this also includes all other subdirectories of the parent directory as packages.

However, when the package module (eg: myapp) was already loaded, then the path from which myapp was loaded is used to find the submodules (eg: myapp.drawers.gtk) and sys.path isn’t looked at, at all. So, here is the trick:

import sys
import os.path

p = os.path.dirname(__file__)
sys.path.append(os.path.abspath(p+"/.."))
__import__(os.path.basename(p))
sys.path.pop()

Note that this script doesn’t work when directly executed, because the __file__ attribute is only available when loaded as a module.

Save this script as loader.py in the root of your application. import loader from the main script in your app, and you’ll be able to import modules by myapp.a.module, where myapp is the root directory name of your application.