Question

I have a python app, that I’m developing. There is a need to use another library, that resides in different directory.

The file layout looks like this:
dir X has two project dirs:

• current-project
• xLibrary

I’d like to use xLibrary in currentProject. I’ve been trying writting code as if all the sources resided in the same directory and calling my projects main script with:

PYTHONPATH=.:../xLibrary ./current-project.py

but this does not work. I’d like to use its code base without installing the library globaly or copying it to my project’s directory. Is it possible? Or if not, how should I deal with this problem.

Answer 1

It’s generally a good programming practice to isolate packages into actual packages and treat them as such. If you’re sure you’d like to continue with that approach though you can modify the search path from within python via:

import sys
sys.path.append( "<path_containing_the_other_python_files>" )

To avoid embedding absolute paths, you can use os.path.abspath(__file__) to obtain the absolute path to the currently executing .py file and follow up with a few os.path.dirname() calls to construct the proper relative path for inclusion to sys.path

A slightly altered approach that would allow you to get the best of both worlds would be to add an __init__.py file to xLibrary‘s directory then add the path containing ‘xLibrary’ to sys.path instead. Subsequent Python code could then import everything “properly” via from xLibrary import my_module rather than just import my_module which could be confusing to people accustomed to the standard package directory layout.