How to import all submodules?

I was writing a small personal library and adding new modules all the time so I wrote a shell script to look for scripts and create the __init__.py‘s. The script is executed just outside of the main directory for my package, pylux.

I know it probably isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but it servered its purpose for me and it might be useful to someone else, too.

#!/bin/bash

echo 'Traversing folder hierarchy...'

CWD=`pwd`


for directory in `find pylux -type d -exec echo {} ;`;
do
    cd $directory
    #echo Entering $directory
    echo -n "" > __init__.py

    for subdirectory in `find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1`;
    do
        subdirectory=`echo $subdirectory | cut -b 3-`
        #echo -n '    ' ...$subdirectory
        #echo -e 't->t' import $subdirectory
        echo import $subdirectory >> __init__.py
    done

    for pyfile in *.py ;
    do
        if [ $pyfile = $(echo __init__.py) ]; then
            continue
        fi
        #echo -n '    ' ...$pyfile
        #echo -e 't->t' import `echo $pyfile | cut -d . -f 1`
        echo import `echo $pyfile | cut -d . -f 1` >> __init__.py
    done
    cd $CWD

done


for directory in `find pylux -type d -exec echo {} ;`;
do
    echo $directory/__init__.py:
    cat $directory/__init__.py | awk '{ print "t"$0 }'
done

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. Add the following to the beginning of the __init__.py file:

__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.

I’ve played around with Joe Kington’s Answer and have built a solution that uses globals and get/setattr and thus doesn’t need eval. A slight modification is that instead of directly using the packages __path__ for walk_packages, I use the packages parent directory and then only import modules starting with __name__ + ".". This was done to reliably get all subpackages from walk_packages – in my use case I had a subpackage named test which caused pkgutil to iterate over the test package from python’s library; furthermore, using __path__ would not recurse into the packages subdirectories. All these issues were observed using jython and python2.5, the code below is only tested in jython thus far.

Also note that OPs question only talks about importing all modules from a package, this code recursively imports all packages too.

from pkgutil import walk_packages
from os import path

__all__ = []
__pkg_prefix = "%s." % __name__
__pkg_path = path.abspath(__path__[0]).rsplit("/", 1)[0] #parent directory

for loader, modname, _ in walk_packages([__pkg_path]):
    if modname.startswith(__pkg_prefix):
        #load the module / package
        module = loader.find_module(modname).load_module(modname)
        modname = modname[len(__pkg_prefix):] #strip package prefix from name
        #append all toplevel modules and packages to __all__
        if not "." in modname:
            __all__.append(modname)
            globals()[modname] = module
        #set everything else as an attribute of their parent package
        else:
            #get the toplevel package from globals()
            pkg_name, rest = modname.split(".", 1)
            pkg = globals()[pkg_name]
            #recursively get the modules parent package via getattr
            while "." in rest:
                subpkg, rest = rest.split(".", 1)
                pkg = getattr(pkg, subpkg)
            #set the module (or package) as an attribute of its parent package
            setattr(pkg, rest, module)

As a future improvement I’ll try to make this dynamic with a __getattr__ hook on the package, so the actual modules are only imported when they are accessed…

This works nicely for me in Python 3.3. Note that this works only for submodules which are in files in the same directory as the __init__.py. With some work however it can be enhanced for supporting submodules in directories too.

from glob import iglob
from os.path import basename, relpath, sep, splitext

def import_submodules(__path__to_here):
    """Imports all submodules.
    Import this function in __init__.py and put this line to it:
    __all__ = import_submodules(__path__)"""
    result = []
    for smfile in iglob(relpath(__path__to_here[0]) + "/*.py"):
        submodule = splitext(basename(smfile))[0]
        importstr = ".".join(smfile.split(sep)[:-1])
        if not submodule.startswith("_"):
            __import__(importstr + "." + submodule)
            result.append(submodule)
    return result

Simply works, and allows relative import inside packages:

def import_submodules(package_name):
    """ Import all submodules of a module, recursively

    :param package_name: Package name
    :type package_name: str
    :rtype: dict[types.ModuleType]
    """
    package = sys.modules[package_name]
    return {
        name: importlib.import_module(package_name + '.' + name)
        for loader, name, is_pkg in pkgutil.walk_packages(package.__path__)
    }

Usage:

__all__ = import_submodules(__name__).keys()

This is based on the answer that kolypto provided, but his answer does not perform recursive import of packages, whereas this does. Although not required by the main question, I believe recursive import applies and can be very useful in many similar situations. I, for one, found this question when searching on the topic.

This is a nice, clean way of performing the import of the subpackage’s modules, and should be portable as well, and it uses the standard lib for python 2.7+ / 3.x.

import importlib
import pkgutil


def import_submodules(package, recursive=True):
    """ Import all submodules of a module, recursively, including subpackages

    :param package: package (name or actual module)
    :type package: str | module
    :rtype: dict[str, types.ModuleType]
    """
    if isinstance(package, str):
        package = importlib.import_module(package)
    results = {}
    for loader, name, is_pkg in pkgutil.walk_packages(package.__path__):
        full_name = package.__name__ + '.' + name
        results[full_name] = importlib.import_module(full_name)
        if recursive and is_pkg:
            results.update(import_submodules(full_name))
    return results

Usage:

# from main.py, as per the OP's project structure
import scripts
import_submodules(scripts)

# Alternatively, from scripts.__init__.py
import_submodules(__name__)

Not nearly as clean as I would like, but none of the cleaner methods worked for me. This achieves the specified behaviour:

Directory structure:

| pkg
|--| __init__.py
   | main.py
   | scripts
   |--| __init__.py
      | script1.py
      | script2.py
      | script3.py

Where pkg/scripts/__init__.py is empty, and pkg/__init__.py contains:

import importlib as _importlib
import pkgutil as _pkgutil
__all__ = [_mod[1].split(".")[-1] for _mod in
           filter(lambda _mod: _mod[1].count(".") == 1 and not 
                               _mod[2] and __name__ in _mod[1],
                  [_mod for _mod in _pkgutil.walk_packages("." + __name__)])]
__sub_mods__ = [".".join(_mod[1].split(".")[1:]) for _mod in
                filter(lambda _mod: _mod[1].count(".") > 1 and not 
                                    _mod[2] and __name__ in _mod[1],
                       [_mod for _mod in 
                        _pkgutil.walk_packages("." + __name__)])]
from . import *
for _module in __sub_mods__:
    _importlib.import_module("." + _module, package=__name__)

Although it’s messy, it should be portable. I’ve used this code for several different packages.

To just load all submodules of a package, you can use this simple function:

import importlib
import pkgutil

def import_submodules(module):
    """Import all submodules of a module, recursively."""
    for loader, module_name, is_pkg in pkgutil.walk_packages(
            module.__path__, module.__name__ + '.'):
        importlib.import_module(module_name)

Use case: load all database models of a Flask app, so that Flask-Migrate could detect changes to the schema. Usage:

import myproject.models
import_submodules(myproject.models)