Question

I have the following files in my directory:

foo/
  foo.py
  foolib/
    __init__.py
    bar.py

Within __init__.py:

__all__ = ["bar"]

Within bar.py:

class Bar:
    def __init__(self):
        None
    def hello(self):
        print("Hello World")
        return

def hi():
    print("Hi World")

Now if I have the following code within foo.py:

from foolib import *

bar.hi()

foobar = Bar()
foobar.hello()

“Hi World” prints, but I get a NameError for Bar(). If I explicitly import the module:

from foolib.bar import *

I get the expected output “Hello World”.

Is there a way for me to import classes from the modules, without explicitly calling them? I feel like I am missing something in the __init__ file. Either that or I am flagrantly violating some Python best practice.

Answer 1

To import the class you must import the class, somewhere. When you do from foolib import *, because of your __init__.py this imports the module bar. It doesn’t allow you to access anything inside that module.

If you want to automatically access everything in bar from the foolib package without having to import bar, you could put this in __init__.py:

from bar import *

This makes everything in bar available directly in foolib.