Python - Get path of root project structure

Question

I\'ve got a python project with a configuration file in the project root. The configuration file needs to be accessed in a few different files throughout the project.

Answer 1

A standard way to achieve this would be to use the pkg_resources module which is part of the setuptools package. setuptools is used to create an install-able python package.

You can use pkg_resources to return the contents of your desired file as a string and you can use pkg_resources to get the actual path of the desired file on your system.

Let's say that you have a package called stackoverflow.

stackoverflow/
|-- app
|   `-- __init__.py
`-- resources
    |-- bands
    |   |-- Dream\ Theater
    |   |-- __init__.py
    |   |-- King's\ X
    |   |-- Megadeth
    |   `-- Rush
    `-- __init__.py

3 directories, 7 files

Now let's say that you want to access the file Rush from a module app.run. Use pkg_resources.resouces_filename to get the path to Rush and pkg_resources.resource_string to get the contents of Rush; thusly:

import pkg_resources

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print pkg_resources.resource_filename('resources.bands', 'Rush')
    print pkg_resources.resource_string('resources.bands', 'Rush')

The output:

/home/sri/workspace/stackoverflow/resources/bands/Rush
Base: Geddy Lee
Vocals: Geddy Lee
Guitar: Alex Lifeson
Drums: Neil Peart

This works for all packages in your python path. So if you want to know where lxml.etree exists on your system:

import pkg_resources

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print pkg_resources.resource_filename('lxml', 'etree')

output:

/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/lxml/etree

The point is that you can use this standard method to access files that are installed on your system (e.g pip install xxx or yum -y install python-xxx) and files that are within the module that you're currently working on.