Question

I have the following folder structure

• lib
• my_module

I have moved all the libraries I need into the lib/ folder.

In my module/__init__.py, I think I will do:

import sys
sys.path.append('../lib/')
import my_dependency

Then when I need to use this dependency, I will refer to it as

my_module.my_dependency

Is this a bad usage of Python import?

NOTE: the dependencies consists of some third-party libraries not available via pip/easy_install and some C++ stuff that I wrote.

Answer 1

sys.path.append('../lib/') assumes that the current working directory is the directory of your script, which may or may not be the case.

A version that doesn’t depend on the working directory is:

import sys, os
sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.split(os.path.split(os.path.abspath(sys.argv[0]))[0])[0], "lib"))
import my_dependency

The above in plain language takes the full path to the script, chops off the last two components (script directory and script filename) and appends lib.