Imagine that you want to develop a non-trivial end-user desktop (not web) application in Python. What is the best way to structure the project's folder hierarchy?
Desirable features are ease of maintenance, IDE-friendliness, suitability for source control branching/merging, and easy generation of install packages.
In particular:
Doesn't too much matter. Whatever makes you happy will work. There aren't a lot of silly rules because Python projects can be simple.
/scripts
or /bin
for that kind of command-line interface stuff/tests
for your tests/lib
for your C-language libraries/doc
for most documentation/apidoc
for the Epydoc-generated API docs.And the top-level directory can contain README's, Config's and whatnot.
The hard choice is whether or not to use a /src
tree. Python doesn't have a distinction between /src
, /lib
, and /bin
like Java or C has.
Since a top-level /src
directory is seen by some as meaningless, your top-level directory can be the top-level architecture of your application.
/foo
/bar
/baz
I recommend putting all of this under the "name-of-my-product" directory. So, if you're writing an application named quux
, the directory that contains all this stuff is named /quux
.
Another project's PYTHONPATH
, then, can include /path/to/quux/foo
to reuse the QUUX.foo
module.
In my case, since I use Komodo Edit, my IDE cuft is a single .KPF file. I actually put that in the top-level /quux
directory, and omit adding it to SVN.