How do I get the current 'package' name? (setup.py)

Question

How do I get the current topmost package, i.e., the name defined in setup.py?

Here is my tree:

.
|-- README.md
|-- the_project_name_for_         


        

Answer 1

Not entirely sure what the larger goal is, but maybe you could be interested in reading about importlib.resources as well as importlib.metadata.

Something like the following:

import importlib.metadata
import importlib.resources

version = importlib.metadata.version('SomeProject')
data = importlib.resources.files('top_level_package.sub_package').joinpath('file.txt').read_text()

And more generally, it is near impossible (or not worth the amount of work) to 100% reliably detect the name of the project (SomeProject) from within the code. It is easier to just hard-code it.

Nevertheless here are some techniques, and ideas to retrieve the name of the project from one of its modules:

• https://bitbucket.org/pypa/distlib/issues/102/getting-the-distribution-that-a-module
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/22845276/11138259
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/56032725/11138259

---

Update:

I believe some function like the following should return the name of the installed distribution containing the current file:

import pathlib
import importlib_metadata

def get_project_name():
    for dist in importlib_metadata.distributions():
        try:
            relative = pathlib.Path(__file__).relative_to(dist.locate_file(''))
        except ValueError:
            pass
        else:
            if relative in dist.files:
                return dist.metadata['Name']
    return None