How to import all submodules?

user_180768 0
Viewed 59897

I have a directory structure as follows:

| main.py
| scripts
|--| __init__.py
   | script1.py
   | script2.py
   | script3.py

From main.py, the module scripts is imported. I tried using pkgutils.walk_packages in combination with __all__, but using that, I can only import all the submodules directly under main using from scripts import *. I would like to get them all under scripts. What would be the cleanest way to import all the submodules of scripts so that I could access scripts.script1 from main?

EDIT: I am sorry that I was a bit vague. I would like to import the submodules on run-time without specifying them explicitly in __init__.py. I can use pkgutils.walk_packages to get the submodule names (unless someone knows of a better way), but I am not sure of the cleanest way to use these names (or maybe the ImpImporters that walk_packages returns?) to import them.

import module python
9 Answers

I got tired of this problem myself, so I wrote a package called automodinit to fix it. You can get it from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/automodinit/. Usage is like this:

  1. Include the automodinit package into your setup.py dependencies.
  2. Add the following to the beginning of the __init__.py file:
__all__ = ["I will get rewritten"]
# Don't modify the line above, or this line!
import automodinit
automodinit.automodinit(__name__, __file__, globals())
del automodinit
# Anything else you want can go after here, it won't get modified.

That's it! From now on importing a module will set __all__ to a list of .py[co] files in the module and will also import each of those files as though you had typed:

for x in __all__: import x

Therefore the effect of from M import * matches exactly import M.

automodinit is happy running from inside ZIP archives and is therefore ZIP safe.

user_8055790

To just load all submodules of a package, you can use this simple function:

import importlib
import pkgutil

def import_submodules(module):
    """Import all submodules of a module, recursively."""
    for loader, module_name, is_pkg in pkgutil.walk_packages(
            module.__path__, module.__name__ + '.'):
        importlib.import_module(module_name)

Use case: load all database models of a Flask app, so that Flask-Migrate could detect changes to the schema. Usage:

import myproject.models
import_submodules(myproject.models)
user_2442970
Related