What is the proper way to work with shared modules in Python development?

Question

I\'m working toward adopting Python as part of my team\'s development tool suite. With the other languages/tools we use, we develop many reusable functions and classes that

Answer 1

The must-read-first on this kind of stuff is here:

What is the best project structure for a Python application?

in case you haven't seen it (and follow the link in the second answer).

The key is that each major package be importable as if "." was the top level directory, which means that it will also work correctly when installed in a site-packages. What this implies is that major packages should all be flat within the top directory, as in:

myproject-0.1/
    myproject/
        framework/
    packageA/
        sub_package_in_A/
            module.py
    packageB/
        ...

Then both you (within your other packages) and your users can import as:

import myproject
import packageA.sub_package_in_A.module

etc

Which means you should think hard about @MattAnderson's comment, but if you want it to appear as a separately-distributable package, it needs to be in the top directory.

Note this doesn't stop you (or your users) from doing an:

import packageA.sub_package_in_A as sub_package_in_A

but it does stop you from allowing:

import sub_package_in_A

directly.