Python import path issue. Suggestions and ideas?

[Ritesh Nadhani]

Hello All

So my sourcecode has the following structure:

/
- app.py
- commonlib.py
- app.cnf
- module/
- module/submodule/
- module/submodule/app2.py

Commonlib is generally used for one method:

def GetConfValue(section, item):
    config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
    config.read( "app.cnf" )

    return config.get(section, item)

So in app.py, I have:

from commonlib import *

and I can use the method, GetConfValue().

Now, if I want to use the same method in app2.py, so if I do:

from CommonLib import * - it naturally throws up an error.

So as a first reaction, I created another file - app2_dummy.py in the same
folder as app.py, and added the code:

from module.submodule.app2 import main as app2main

app2main()

which as you can see - a very bad way!!!!

Doing a Google search threw up bunch of stuff on os.path.append and looking
at it, I added the following two lines at top of app2.py

sys.path.append("/".join(os.path.abspath(sys.argv[0]).split('/')[:-3]))

looks ugly but adds the path correctly and I can use, import CommonLib.

So my question, is this the correct way of doing things? This means I will
have to put this line in every python script in that folder and subsequent
folder.

Why I ask is that when I was calling GetConfValue() from app2.py, it gave me
error that app.cnf was not found which is probably due to the fact that
app2.py was started from module/submodule/, so I changed the method to:

def GetConfValue(section, item):
    config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
    config.read( os.path.dirname(__file__) + os.sep + "app.cnf" )

    return config.get(section, item)

which then works.

I even found that you can tell Python to add folder using .pth but I added
app.pth in module/submodule/ and had the line:

../../

but it didnt work either (I believe I am doing something very stupid on that
part.....)

Thoughts?

Ritesh
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