Question

Imagine that you want to develop a non-trivial end-user desktop (not web) application in Python. What is the best way to structure the project’s folder hierarchy?

Desirable features are ease of maintenance, IDE-friendliness, suitability for source control branching/merging, and easy generation of install packages.

In particular:

1. Where do you put the source?
2. Where do you put application startup scripts?
3. Where do you put the IDE project cruft?
4. Where do you put the unit/acceptance tests?
5. Where do you put non-Python data such as config files?
6. Where do you put non-Python sources such as C++ for pyd/so binary extension modules?

Answer 1

Doesn’t too much matter. Whatever makes you happy will work. There aren’t a lot of silly rules because Python projects can be simple.

• /scripts or /bin for that kind of command-line interface stuff
• /tests for your tests
• /lib for your C-language libraries
• /doc for most documentation
• /apidoc for the Epydoc-generated API docs.

And the top-level directory can contain README’s, Config’s and whatnot.

The hard choice is whether or not to use a /src tree. Python doesn’t have a distinction between /src, /lib, and /bin like Java or C has.

Since a top-level /src directory is seen by some as meaningless, your top-level directory can be the top-level architecture of your application.

• /foo
• /bar
• /baz

I recommend putting all of this under the ‘name-of-my-product’ directory. So, if you’re writing an application named quux, the directory that contains all this stuff is named /quux.

Another project’s PYTHONPATH, then, can include /path/to/quux/foo to reuse the QUUX.foo module.

In my case, since I use Komodo Edit, my IDE cuft is a single .KPF file. I actually put that in the top-level /quux directory, and omit adding it to SVN.