How to find where a Python class is defined

Question

Let's say I have a number in Python project and I want to find out in what package/module a particular class is defined (I know the class name). Is there an efficient way to do it?

Answer 1

One way to get the location of a class is using a combination of the __module__ attribute of a class and the sys.modules dictionary.

Example:

import sys
from stl import stl

module = sys.modules[stl.BaseStl.__module__]
print module.__file__

I should note that this doesn't always give the correct module, it just gives the module where you got it from. A more thorough (but slower) method is using the inspect module:

from stl import stl
import inspect

print inspect.getmodule(stl.BaseStl).__file__

Answer 2

You can use the inspect module to get the location where a module/package is defined.

inspect.getmodule(my_class)

Sample Output:

<module 'module_name' from '/path/to/my/module.py'>

As per the docs,

inspect.getmodule(object)
Try to guess which module an object was defined in.