Standard process to locate file locations in Python and pyinstaller?

Question

Is there a standard process in locating files in Python? If I have a data file my code is using as reference, different packaging managers store the files in different locations.

Was recommended to use:

import pkg_resources

resource_pkg = pkg_resources.get_distribution('MY_FILE_HERE').location

However, if I use something like pyinstaller, packaging my code as a .exe, the file location is not installed with pkg_resources anymore and my code is now broken. Is there a common process that all package managers follow? Else I would have to rely on environmental variables? What would be the method with pyinstaller?

Answer 1

The pkg_resources docs explain that attribute:

location

A string indicating the distribution’s location. For an importable distribution, this is the string that would be added to sys.path to make it actively importable. For non-importable distributions, this is simply a filename, URL, or other way of locating the distribution.

Your packaged .exe is non-importable, so it sounds like you'll need another way to access the bits.

Consider downloading from an URL to a cache in the user's homedir, at run time or preferably at install time.

The pyinstaller docs suggest using __file__:

path_to_dat = path.join(path.dirname(__file__), 'file.dat')