How to retrieve a module's path?

import a_module
print(a_module.__file__)

Will actually give you the path to the .pyc file that was loaded, at least on Mac OS X. So I guess you can do:

import os
path = os.path.abspath(a_module.__file__)

You can also try:

path = os.path.dirname(a_module.__file__)

To get the module's directory.

This was trivial.

Each module has a __file__ variable that shows its relative path from where you are right now.

Therefore, getting a directory for the module to notify it is simple as:

os.path.dirname(__file__)

import os
path = os.path.abspath(__file__)
dir_path = os.path.dirname(path)

you can just import your module then hit its name and you'll get its full path

>>> import os
>>> os
<module 'os' from 'C:\\Users\\Hassan Ashraf\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python36-32\\lib\\os.py'>
>>>

If you want to retrieve the module path without loading it:

import importlib.util

print(importlib.util.find_spec("requests").origin)

Example output:

/usr/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/requests/__init__.py

So I spent a fair amount of time trying to do this with py2exe The problem was to get the base folder of the script whether it was being run as a python script or as a py2exe executable. Also to have it work whether it was being run from the current folder, another folder or (this was the hardest) from the system's path.

Eventually I used this approach, using sys.frozen as an indicator of running in py2exe:

import os,sys
if hasattr(sys,'frozen'): # only when running in py2exe this exists
    base = sys.prefix
else: # otherwise this is a regular python script
    base = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))

If you want to retrieve the package's root path from any of its modules, the following works (tested on Python 3.6):

from . import __path__ as ROOT_PATH
print(ROOT_PATH)

The main __init__.py path can also be referenced by using __file__ instead.

Hope this helps!

When you import a module, yo have access to plenty of information. Check out dir(a_module). As for the path, there is a dunder for that: a_module.__path__. You can also just print the module itself.

>>> import a_module
>>> print(dir(a_module))
['__builtins__', '__cached__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__path__', '__spec__']
>>> print(a_module.__path__)
['/.../.../a_module']
>>> print(a_module)
<module 'a_module' from '/.../.../a_module/__init__.py'>

If you would like to know absolute path from your script you can use Path object:

from pathlib import Path

print(Path().absolute())
print(Path().resolve('.'))
print(Path().cwd())

cwd() method

Return a new path object representing the current directory (as returned by os.getcwd())

resolve() method

Make the path absolute, resolving any symlinks. A new path object is returned:

If you installed it using pip, "pip show" works great ('Location')

$ pip show detectron2

Name: detectron2
Version: 0.1
Summary: Detectron2 is FAIR next-generation research platform for object detection and segmentation.
Home-page: https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2
Author: FAIR
Author-email: None
License: UNKNOWN
Location: /home/ubuntu/anaconda3/envs/pytorch_p36/lib/python3.6/site-packages
Requires: yacs, tabulate, tqdm, pydot, tensorboard, Pillow, termcolor, future, cloudpickle, matplotlib, fvcore

Update:

$ python -m pip show mymodule

(author: wisbucky)

I'd like to contribute with one common scenario (in Python 3) and explore a few approaches to it.

The built-in function open() accepts either relative or absolute path as its first argument. The relative path is treated as relative to the current working directory though so it is recommended to pass the absolute path to the file.

Simply said, if you run a script file with the following code, it is not guaranteed that the example.txt file will be created in the same directory where the script file is located:

with open('example.txt', 'w'):
    pass

To fix this code we need to get the path to the script and make it absolute. To ensure the path to be absolute we simply use the os.path.realpath() function. To get the path to the script there are several common functions that return various path results:

• os.getcwd()
• os.path.realpath('example.txt')
• sys.argv[0]
• __file__

Both functions os.getcwd() and os.path.realpath() return path results based on the current working directory. Generally not what we want. The first element of the sys.argv list is the path of the root script (the script you run) regardless of whether you call the list in the root script itself or in any of its modules. It might come handy in some situations. The __file__ variable contains path of the module from which it has been called.

The following code correctly creates a file example.txt in the same directory where the script is located:

filedir = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
filepath = os.path.join(filedir, 'example.txt')

with open(filepath, 'w'):
    pass

Here is a quick bash script in case it's useful to anyone. I just want to be able to set an environment variable so that I can pushd to the code.

#!/bin/bash
module=${1:?"I need a module name"}

python << EOI
import $module
import os
print os.path.dirname($module.__file__)
EOI

Shell example:

[root@sri-4625-0004 ~]# export LXML=$(get_python_path.sh lxml)
[root@sri-4625-0004 ~]# echo $LXML
/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/lxml
[root@sri-4625-0004 ~]#

If your import is a site-package (e.g. pandas) I recommend this to get its directory (does not work if import is a module, like e.g. pathlib):

from importlib import resources  # part of core Python
import pandas as pd

package_dir = resources.path(package=pd, resource="").__enter__()

In general importlib.resources can be considered when a task is about accessing paths/resources of a site package.

If you used pip, then you can call pip show, but you must call it using the specific version of python that you are using. For example, these could all give different results:

$ python -m pip show numpy
$ python2.7 -m pip show numpy
$ python3 -m pip show numpy

Location: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python

Don't simply run $ pip show numpy, because there is no guarantee that it will be the same pip that different python versions are calling.