Question

Short of it – I need to get a console_script to return to me its current run path, so that I can override modules it is using at run time.

Here is my basic setup (summarized as best I could):

    package_1:
      caller_module.py

    console_script_module:
      main.py
      dir_of_modules_to_use/
        a.py
        b.py
        c.py
      setup.py

    setup.py contents:
      setup(
        entry_points = {
          'console_scripts': [
            'console-script-module = console_script_module.main:main'
           ]
         }
        )         

Longer detail:
So caller_module.py calls console-script-module by issuing a subprocess call. In turn the modules seen in dir_of_modules_to_use are run. I would like to provide my own version of those modules by overriding them right before this happens through a separate script. In order to do this I need to know the run path of where console-script-module has been installed as it is not consistent (changes in virtualenv’s for example).

I tried adding this in to main.py and using a separate command line argument to call it:

    def print_absoulute_dir():    
      print os.path.abspath('dir_of_modules_to_use')

Unfortunately this only returns the path of wherever I make the call to the console script.

DISCLAIMER – this is hacky and awful I know, it’s from code I inherited and I just need something working in the short term. I unfortunately cannot change the code within caller_module.py at this time, otherwise I would just change how it is calling console_script_module:main.py.

Answer 1

I’m not sure if i really understand what you want, but every python module has the __file__
attribute, which contains its location in the filesystem,
and you can use sys.path to modify python module search path

import urllib
import sys

print urllib.__file__
print sys.path