How to structure python packages without repeating top level name for import

Question

I\'m brand new at python package management, and surely have done something wrong. I was encouraged to create a directory structure as follows:

bagoftricks
         


        

Answer 1

The first level "bagoftricks" is fine. That's just the name of your "project" so to speak. In the you have a setup.py, and other files that tell the packaging systems what they need to know.

You can then have the code directly in this module, or in a src directory. You can even go as far as just having this structure:

bagoftricks
├── bagoftricks.py
├── README.md
└── setup.py

But I would not recommend that, mostly because you might want to reorganize things later, and it's easier if you already have a "proper" package. Also most people, tools and docs assume you have a package, so it's easier.

So the minimum would be:

bagoftricks
├── bagoftricks
│   └── __init__.py
├── README.md
└── setup.py

With __init__.py containing the functions you want to import. You then use these functions like this:

from bagoftricks import levenshtein, anotherfunction

Once that __init__.py becomes too big, you want to split it up in several modules, giving you something like this:

bagoftricks
├── bagoftricks
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── anothermodule.py
│   └── levenshtein.py
├── README.md
└── setup.py

Your __init__.py should then import the functions from the various modules:

from bagoftricks.levenshtein import levenshtein
from bagoftricks.anothermodule import anotherfunction

And then you can still use them like like you did before.