Python pip data_files

Development
1

I’m currently trying to create a package for my python project GitHub - zeratax/matrix-registration: a token based matrix registration api
And creating an expression to install this package is fairly simple, except for
the data_file option in setup.py to ship a sample configuration file.
My python project later reads from this sample file if no configuration is found.

Usually with others distros I just looked at what python gave me with sys.prefix() or just __location__

but nix puts this file here:

/nix/store/xxxxxxxxx-python3.7-matrix-registration-0.5.6/config/config.sample.yaml

And I’m wondering if there is a smart way for me to find this place from my python application, instead of doing something like

__location__ + "../../../config/config.sample.yaml"

Furthermore I would like to develop a module to configure this package later. So my second question would be if this location where the sample config is currently put is also a good place to put the final configuration file that I would create with my module?

2

from https://docs.python.org/3/distutils/setupscript.html#installing-additional-files

The directory should be a relative path. It is interpreted relative to the installation prefix (Python’s sys.prefix for system installations

The prefix is the store path. Looking at your setup.py it would install it in /config/config.sample.yaml, that does not every seem to be a good place.

Check importlib.resources (standard library) and alternatively pkg_resources (setuptools).

3

yes I’ve read that and already tried using prefix, but this is the store path to my python install not to my python package, so something like
/nix/store/xxx-python3-3.7.6/config/

And importlib.resources points to /nix/store/xxx-python3.7-matrix-registration-0.5.6/lib/python3.7/site-packages/matrix_registration/config.sample.yaml
instead of
/nix/store/xxx-python3.7-matrix-registration-0.5.6/config/config.sample.yaml

so pretty much the same as what I get with using __location__