[Distutils] Accessing package data files in wheels

[Paul Moore]

On 27 June 2015 at 19:52, Justin Uang <justin.uang at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the recommended way to get access to a data file in my package if
> I'm using a wheel? pkg_resources seems like it's mainly useful because eggs
> might be used in a zipped form, but for wheels, I'm guaranteed that the data
> will be unpacked into a directory structure right? In that case, should I
> just use __file__ to manually find the location of the file?


If you want to avoid a dependency on pkg_resources, you can use
pkgutil.get_data (from the stdlib). It doesn't have as many features
as pkg_resources, but it does the job in straightforward cases.

Regarding zipped form, you are never guaranteed that your code is on
the filesystem. Wheels always install unzipped, as you say, but
deployment utilities like pyzzer/zipapp, or py2exe/cx_Freeze, bundle
your application into a zip file for execution. So unless you want to
document that your package doesn't support such deployment methods,
you shouldn't assume you're installed to the filesystem (and hence you
should avoid using __file__ and doing path manipulation on it).

Paul