Dynamic importing of modules followed by instantiation of objects with a certain baseclass from said modules

Question

I\'m writing an application. No fancy GUI:s or anything, just a plain old console application. This application, lets call it App, needs to be able to load plugins on startu

Answer 1

You might do something like this:

for c in candidates:
    modname = os.path.splitext(c)[0]
    try:
        module=__import__(modname)   #<-- You can get the module this way
    except (ImportError,NotImplementedError):
        continue
    for cls in dir(module):          #<-- Loop over all objects in the module's namespace
        cls=getattr(module,cls)
        if (inspect.isclass(cls)                # Make sure it is a class 
            and inspect.getmodule(cls)==module  # Make sure it was defined in module, not just imported
            and issubclass(cls,base)):          # Make sure it is a subclass of base
            # print('found in {f}: {c}'.format(f=module.__name__,c=cls))
            classList.append(cls)

To test the above, I had to modify your code a bit; below is the full script.

import sys
import inspect
import os

class PluginBase(object): pass

def search(base):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk('.'):
        candidates = [fname for fname in files if fname.endswith('.py') 
                      and not fname.startswith('__')]
        classList=[]
        if candidates:
            for c in candidates:
                modname = os.path.splitext(c)[0]
                try:
                    module=__import__(modname)
                except (ImportError,NotImplementedError):
                    continue
                for cls in dir(module):
                    cls=getattr(module,cls)
                    if (inspect.isclass(cls)
                        and inspect.getmodule(cls)==module
                        and issubclass(cls,base)):
                        # print('found in {f}: {c}'.format(f=module.__name__,c=cls))
                        classList.append(cls)
        print(classList)

search(PluginBase)