How to load all modules in a folder?

Question

Could someone provide me with a good way of importing a whole directory of modules?
I have a structure like this:

/Foo
    bar.py
    spam.py
    eggs.py         


        

Answer 1

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. Replace all __init__.py files like this:

__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.

Niall