I am trying to make a module discoverable on a system where I don't have write access to the global site-packages
directory, and without changing the environment (PYTHONPATH
). I have tried to place a .pth
file in the same directory as a script I'm executing, but it seems to be ignored. E.g., I created a file extras.pth
with the following content:
N:\PythonExtras\lib\site-packages
But the following script, placed and run in the same directory, prints False
.
import sys print r"N:\PythonExtras\lib\site-packages" in sys.paths
The only directory in sys.path
to which I have write access is the directory containing the script. Is there another (currently non-existent) directory where I could place extras.pth
and have it be seen? Is there a better way to go about this?
I'm using python 2.7 on Windows. All .pth
questions I could find here use the system module directories.
Edit: I've tracked down the Windows per-user installation directory, at %APPDATA%\Python\Python27\site-packages
. I can place a module there and it will be imported, but if I put a .pth
file there, it has no effect. Is this really not supposed to work, or am I doing something wrong?
Uses for sitecustomize include extending the import path and enabling coverage, profiling, or other development tools. For example, this sitecustomize.py script extends the import path with a directory based on the current platform.
there is a site package directory in a virtualenv. You can get the directory for site-specific modules inside/outside virtualenv using python -c "from distutils. sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())" (it works on both Python 2 and 3 too). This should be in any basic tutorial on using python.
sys. path is a built-in variable within the sys module. It contains a list of directories that the interpreter will search in for the required module. When a module(a module is a python file) is imported within a Python file, the interpreter first searches for the specified module among its built-in modules.
As described in the documentation, PTH files are only processed if they are in the site-packages directory. (More precisely, they are processed if they are in a "site directory", but "site directory" itself is a setting global to the Python installation and does not depend on the current directory or the directory where the script resides.)
If the directory containing your script is on sys.path
, you could create a sitecustomize.py
in that directory. This will be loaded when Python starts up. Inside sitecustomize.py
, you can do:
import site site.addsitedir('/some/dir/you/want/on/the/path')
This will not only add that directory, but will add it as a "site directory", causing PTH files there to be processed. This is handy if you want to create your own personal site-packages
-like-directory.
If you only need to add one or two directories to the path, you could do so more simply. Just create a tiny Python library that manipulates sys.path
, and then import that library from your script. Something like:
# makepath.py import sys sys.path.append('/whatever/dir/you/want') # script.py import makepath
Edit: Again, according to the documentation, there is the possibility of a site-specific directory in %APPDATA%\Python\PythonXY\site-packages
(on Windows). You could try that, if in fact you have write access to that (and not just to your script directory).
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