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Converting a Module to a Package

It’s happened often (well, twice) that I’ve had a Python module that started to get a little too big for its britches: maybe approaching 1000 lines, maybe just including several subclasses which are related but really ought to have their own files. Documentation on the Python packaging system can be a bit daunting. I don’t think I need to use setuptools or distutils or distribute because this module is intended only for the use of me and my team. I just want to organize my code better.

Making a module into a package is an easy way to make it possible to split it into different source files which are all available under the same name. In simple cases, you can do it with zero modification to the code that imports the module. As a very basic example: say you have a module in your PYTHONPATH named parts.py with two classes, Widget and Grommet. You want these two classes to have their own files, but still import them from parts.

First, create a directory named parts in the same location and two files named Widget.py and Grommet.py in it; move the source for each class into the corresponding file. Then create a text file in the parts directory named __init__.py. Edit __init__.py and add the following:

from Widget import Widget
from Grommet import Grommet

This makes Widget and Grommet accessible by using, e.g., from parts import Widget or

import parts
parts.Widget

just as when the two were both in the parts.py file.

If Widget and Grommet have some shared code, you can put that code in a third file, alongside the files for the two classes, and import it into those files normally. Now if you want to, say, add a subclass to Widget, you can do so in Widget.py without cluttering up the Grommet code.