Find path of module without importing in Python

Question

I\'ve seen several approaches for finding the path of a module by first importing it. Is there a way to do this without importing the module?

Answer 1

You might want to try running this in your interpreter:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.modules['codecs'].__file__ # codecs is just an example
'/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.pyc'

Answer 2

Using pkgutil module:

>>> import pkgutil
>>> package = pkgutil.get_loader("pip")
>>> package.filename
'/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pip-0.7.1-py2.6.egg/pip'
>>> package = pkgutil.get_loader("threading")
>>> package.filename
'/usr/lib/python2.6/threading.py'
>>> package = pkgutil.get_loader("sqlalchemy.orm")
>>> package.filename
'/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/sqlalchemy/orm'

Using imp module:

>>> import imp
>>> imp.find_module('sqlalchemy')
(None, '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/sqlalchemy', ('', '', 5))
>>> imp.find_module('pip')
(None, '/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pip-0.7.1-py2.6.egg/pip', ('', '', 5))
>>> imp.find_module('threading')
(<open file '/usr/lib/python2.6/threading.py', mode 'U' at 0x7fb708573db0>, '/usr/lib/python2.6/threading.py', ('.py', 'U', 1))

N.B: with imp module you can't do something like imp.find_module('sqlalchmy.orm')

Answer 3

For python3 imp is deprecated. Use pkgutil (as seen above) or for Python 3.4+ use importlib.util.find_spec:

>>> import importlib
>>> spec = importlib.util.find_spec("threading")
>>> spec.origin
'/usr/lib64/python3.6/threading.py'