Python modules, referencing other modules within the same package?

Question

I've got a simple python package with the following directory structure:

wibble
|
|-----foo
|      |----ping.py
|
|-----bar
|      |----pong.py

Simple question: How would I reference a function / class in ping.py from pong.py? Looking through the documentation, this appears to be as simple as creating __init__.py files in the root of wibble, foo and bar and then from pong.py doing something like from wibble.foo.ping import important_function. However, trying this leads to No module named wibble.foo.ping.

I'm sure I've missed something in the documentation somewhere, because this must be possible to do. I'm also a little hazy on the differentiation between a module and a namespace, my background is c#.net, so any analogies here will be useful.

pgebhard · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-13 20:29:57Z

3

you need to add wibble to python path (see the official documentation), one way is

import sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/wibble')

Another way is with the environment variable PYTHONPATH

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/wibble

edited Dec 13, 2012 at 20:29

pgebhard

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answered Apr 24, 2012 at 19:51

diegueus9

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5 Comments

alan Over a year ago

On Windows, so it would be PATH=%PATH%;c:\path\to\wibble (Just guessing because of c#.net reference.)

growse Over a year ago

I should have said - this is being developed on *nix. My concern about this solution is that it hard-ties the absolute location of the package to the codebase / infrastructure. Given that these files are easily locatable relative to each other, why can't pong know that it's in the wibble package and then locate ping that way?

diegueus9 Over a year ago

You can dinamicly guess the location of pong.py file and add the wibble folder to python path, but definetly that is a bad practice

diegueus9 Over a year ago

if you use something like setup.py for your package the code will worok, but the issue here is: your folder wibble is not in the python path.

growse Over a year ago

I agree that guesswork is bad practice. I'll try the sys.path.append approach on both ping and pong.

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