Even if you have other plans for distribution, it might be worth putting together a basic setup.py
in your src
folder. That way, you can run setup.py develop
to have distutils put a link to your code onto your default path (meaning any changes you make will be reflected in-place without having to "reinstall", and all modules will "just work," no matter where your scripts are). It'd be a one-time step, but that's still one more step than zero, so it depends on whether that's more trouble than updating .bashrc
. If you use pip, the equivalent would be pip install -e /path/to/src
.
The more-robust solution--especially if you're going to be mirroring/versioning these scripts on several developers' machines--is to do your development work inside a controlled virtual environment. It turns out virtualenv even has built-in support for making your own bootstrap customizations. It seems like you'd just need an after_install()
hook to either tweak sitecustomize
, run pip install -e
, or add a plain .pth
file to site-packages. The custom bootstrap could live in your source control along with the other scripts, and would need to be run once for each developer's setup. You'd also have the normal benefits of using virtualenv (explicit dependency versioning, isolation from system-wide configuration, and standardization between disparate machines, to name a few).
If you really don't want to have any setup steps whatsoever and are willing to only run these scripts from inside the 'project' directory, then you could plop in an __init__.py
as such:
project/
src/
some_module.py
scripts/
__init__.py # special "magic"
some_script.py
And these are what your files could look like:
# file: project/src/some_module.py
print("importing %r" % __name__)
def some_function():
print("called some_function() inside %s" % __name__)
--------------------------------------------------------
# file: project/scripts/some_script.py
import some_module
if __name__ == '__main__':
some_module.some_function()
--------------------------------------------------------
# file: project/scripts/__init__.py
import sys
from os.path import dirname, abspath, join
print("doing magic!")
sys.path.insert(0, join(dirname(dirname(abspath(__file__))), 'src'))
Then you'd have to run your scripts like so:
[~/project] $ python -m scripts.some_script
doing magic!
importing 'some_module'
called some_function() inside some_module
Beware! The scripts can only be called like this from inside project/
:
[~/otherdir] $ python -m scripts.some_script
ImportError: no module named scripts
To enable that, you're back to editing .bashrc
, or using one of the options above. The last option should really be a last resort; as @Simon said, you're really fighting the language at that point.