How to import custom module in julia

Question

I have a module I wrote here:

# Hello.jl
module Hello
    function foo
        return 1
    end
end

and

# Main.jl
using Hel         


        

Answer 1

Though 张实唯's answer is the most convenient, you should not use include outside the REPL. If you're writing a program file, go through the trouble of adding the appropriate directory to the LOAD_PATH. Remy gives a very good explanation of how to do so, but it's worth also explaining why you should do so in the first place. (Additionally from the docs: push!(LOAD_PATH, "/Path/To/My/Module/") but note your module and your file have to have the same name)

The problem is that anything you include will be defined right where you call include even if it is also defined elsewhere. Since the goal of modules is re-use, you'll probably eventually use MyModule in more than one file. If you call include in each file, then each will have its own definition of MyModule, and even though they are identical, these will be different definitions. That means any data defined in the MyModule (such as data types) will not be the same.

To see why this is a huge problem, consider these three files:

types.jl

module TypeModule
struct A end
export A
end

a_function.jl

include("types.jl")
module AFunctionModule
using TypeModule
function takes_a(a::A)
    println("Took A!")
end
export takes_a
end

function_caller.jl

include("a_function.jl")
include("types.jl")
using TypeModule, AFunctionModule
my_a = A()
takes_a(my_a)

If you run julia function_caller.jl you'll get MethodError: no method matching takes_a(::TypeModule.A). This is because the type A used in function_caller.jl is different from the one used in a_function.jl. In this simple case, you can actually "fix" the problem by reversing the order of the includes in function_caller.jl (or just by deleting include("types.jl") entirely from function_caller.jl! That's not good!). But what if you wanted another file b_function.jl that also used a type defined in TypeModule? You would have to do something very hacky. Or you could just modify your LOAD_PATH so the module is only defined once.

EDIT in response to xji: To distribute a module, you'd use Pkg (docs). I understood the premise of this question to be a custom, personal module.

Incidentally, if you really don't like the idea of modifying your load path (even if it's only within the scope of a single script...) you could symlink your module into a package directory (e.g. ~/.julia/v0.6/MyModule/MyModule.jl) and then Pkg.add(MyModule) and then import as normal. I find that to be a bit more trouble.