how to locate a same folder on different machines on different directory?

Question

I have two folders named Student and Faculty in the directory /home/ubuntu/Desktop/Pythontraining. I need to save totally 10 files inside Student folder and 3 files inside the Faculty folder.I need to do the same in another system where the Student and Faculty folders are present in different directory(say: /home/documents/college).How to store the file into the respective folders on two different machines without hardcoding the path?

Answer 1

For this kind of problem, you have multiple solutions :

Create environment variable on each machine, and inside the script do stuff like this :

import os
student_path = os.environ['STUDENT_PATH']
faculty_path = os.environ['FACULTY_PATH']

print(student_path, faculty_path)

Personal opinion : I don't like to configure my scripts using environment variables as the ones you chose may be used by another software + it is always messy to debug

---

Use arguments

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-s", "--student")
parser.add_argument("-f", "--faculty")

args = parser.parse_args()
student_path = args.student
faculty_path = args.faculty

print(student_path, faculty_path)

And then call your script like this and adapt this line depending on the machine

python <yourscript> -s <student_path> -f <faculty_path>

Personal opinion : I use arguments when I want to control a small amount of parameters on my scripts to change its behavior (verbose, nb of cpus, ...).

---

Create a config file and use configparser

config.ini file

[Paths]
student_path=<path_on_machine>
faculty_path=<path_on_machine>

Usage on script :

import configparser

config = configparser.ConfigParser()
config.read('config.ini')
student_path = config.get('Paths', 'student_path')
faculty_path = config.get('Paths', 'faculty_path')

print(student_path, faculty_path)

And then deploy different config.ini files on each machine (tools like ansible can help you to automate this)

Personal opinion : I use config files when I need to adapt parameters when deploying on new machines. I don't like to use arguments for this purpose as I don't want to specify the same values every time I use my script (often these kind of parameters don't have good default values).

---

Create a module

You can also create a module to store these parameters instead of a config file.

my_config.py

student_path="<path_on_machine>"
faculty_path="<path_on_machine>"

And then import it

script.py

import my_config

print(my_config.student_path, my_config.faculty_path)

I don't have any personal opinion on config files vs config modules. Read this if you want some elements of comparison.

Answer 2

You can use walk library for finding destination folder path. It's working best if you have only one folder for each search name:

import os

start = "/home/"

for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(start):
    found = False
    for dirname in dirnames:
        if dirname == 'Student':
            full_path = os.path.join(dirpath, dirname)
            found = True
            break
    if found:
        break

Output:

/home/.../Student