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pythonpackagedistutils

Using package files from script

If I have a script in my Python package, how can I get it to read other files from the package, since __file__ contains (for example) /usr/bin/myscript and not /usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/mypackage/myscript?

(The files are just templates, not modules.)

Solution

  • You could use the ResourceManager API from setuptools' pkg_resources:

    import pkg_resources
my_stream = pkg_resources.resource_stream(__name__, "foo.dat")

    will open my.package/my/package/foo.dat as the file-like object my_stream for example.

    This will work for regular as well as zipped eggs. Note however that this requires setuptools to be installed. For a solution that only uses the standard library (which is to be preferred), see @abarnert's answer.