Auto-load a module on python startup
Unless -S
option is passed to the python
binary, a special site module is imported by default before the execution is passed to your script, or the interactive interpreter. Among other things the module looks for *.pth
files. On each line the *.pth
files should contain either a path to include into sys.path
, or a command to execute. The module as well imports sitecustomize
, and usercustomize
(which can contain arbitrary code, a good way to make your colleagues crazy, if they happen to raise errors) if they exist somewhere in sys.path
.
The problem is though, that the current directory in not in sys.path
when the site
module is imported, that is it is hard to configure your particular script.
I sometimes add the following line at the beginning of my scripts, so that the script would start with searchin for .pth
files in the current directory and adding the missing paths to sys.path
:
# search for *.pth files in the current directory
import site; site.addsitedir('')
Check the file ~/.ipython/ipythonrc
- you can list all modules you want to load at the startup.
Another possible solution is to use the argument -i
from python
interpreter that launches the interaction mode after executing your script.
You could for instance use:
python -i your_module.py
python -i /path/to/your/module
in case you have defined a__main__.py
- or even
python -i -m your.module
Have a .pythonstartup
in your home directory and load modules there and point PYTHONSTARTUP
env to that file.
Python commands in that file are executed before the first prompt is displayed in interactive mode.
- http://docs.python.org/using/cmdline.html
I use it for enabling command line completion in python interpreter shell