Importing files from different folder

Ivan picture Ivan · Dec 8, 2010 · Viewed 1.7M times · Source

I have the following folder structure.

application
├── app
│   └── folder
│       └── file.py
└── app2
    └── some_folder
        └── some_file.py

I want to import some functions from file.py in some_file.py.

I've tried

from application.app.folder.file import func_name

and some other various attempts but so far I couldn't manage to import properly. How can I do this?

Answer

Cameron picture Cameron · Dec 8, 2010

Note: This answer was intended for a very specific question. For most programmers coming here from a search engine, this is not the answer you are looking for. Typically you would structure your files into packages (see other answers) instead of modifying the search path.


By default, you can't. When importing a file, Python only searches the directory that the entry-point script is running from and sys.path which includes locations such as the package installation directory (it's actually a little more complex than this, but this covers most cases).

However, you can add to the Python path at runtime:

# some_file.py
import sys
# insert at 1, 0 is the script path (or '' in REPL)
sys.path.insert(1, '/path/to/application/app/folder')

import file