Including a local python module

As we saw in reusing your python code, you can create a python file, a module, that contains our core business logic and then re-use that file. This post is going to talk about to make that happen.

What happens when you import antigravity? The python interpreter is going to check all the places it knows to find modules. It's going to check the install location for a module, it's going to check if you defined pythonhome/pythonpath environment variables, and you can hint to your hearts desire where to find files. If I import a real module, import pprint, I can access the __file__ property which will tell you where it found the module. In my case it was C:\Python38\lib\pprint.py

Python is happy to tell you what the current search path is import sys print(sys.path)

On my machine, that displays an array of ['', 'C:\\Python38\\python38.zip', 'C:\\Python38\\DLLs', 'C:\\Python38\\lib', 'C:\\Python38', 'C:\\Python38\\lib\\site-packages'] If I want reusable_code.py to be callable by another module, then it needs to exist in one of those locations. That first entry of a blank path is the current directory so as long as the module I need is in the same folder, we're golden! I have added i_use_resuable.py to the same folder as the above

# This module lives in the same folder as our reusable_code.py file
import reusable_code


def main():
    c = reusable_code.Configuration()
    print(c.get_modify_date())


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Executing that, I get the expected timestamp - the exact same experience as running our corporate file but now I can focus on using the business logic instead of writing it. We're going to need something more though if we're going to get this reuable code into our pyspark cluster.

In the next post, we'll learn how to package our business module up into something we can install instead of just assuming where the file is.

As always, the code is on my github repro