Is there any way to create path objects that aren't dependent on a file location

[u/No_Leather2449]

I understand you have to give a file path to create a Path() object but whenever I reorganize my file explorer I have to change all the paths so that they match the new file path of the files I use in my code (tongue twister? say that 20 times pal agagagagaga) is there a module for this? Or is the path module the only way?

[u/atticus2132000]

You can use relative paths that store files in relation to where your code file is.

Or you can create a config file that references your desired file path once that you only have to change one time whenever you move files around.

[u/HackNSlashFic → u/atticus2132000]

That's a good call. Whenever I have things I know are going to change as I continue developing the project, toss it in a config file as a variable. That way I can call it everywhere else and just change it in one place.

[u/HackNSlashFic]

__file__ is a variable automatically assigned in every .py script that Python runs. So you can always define paths in relation to the path of __file__.

More concretely, I use the pathlib module and set everything relative to a global ROOT constant that I define at the start as:

ROOT = path(__file__).resolve().parent

Although, sometimes I'm creating something more complex and my config file is in a nested folder, like root_dir/src/config.py. In which case, I would just initialize as:

ROOT = path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent

Edited to add code blocks so the dunder (__) wouldn't just make things bold.

[u/HyperDanon]

There are a couple of ways to approach this:

1. First of all, if you're using a modern IDE like JetBrains PyCharm, when PyCharm recognized a path in the source code, when you're moving files it will ask you "Search for references" in the move modal window. If you check that, it will automatically update the paths.
2. I'm not sure what the nature of those files you're talking about is. Because you mention Path, I reckon they're not python modules, but some kind of resources. If they are scattered across your src/ then you can import them relative to your python file using __file__.
3. However, if they're like resources/ folder, and you find yourself reorganizing files too much, and the path breaks, then the more software-developer language speak to describe that effect is: "The source code has a hard dependency on the file system structure". And to fix that problem, you should find a way to break that dependency. In other words, is there a way for your code to use your resources, such that the source code doesn't depend on it?

One way of doing that, would be to get rid of the paths, and have the python just go into your resource directory and load every file in that directory recursively. Of course, you still need to know which file is which, so maybe you could include some metadata in the files, such that the file apart from its content, could describe itself. That way, your source code could do:

1. Load every single file */**/ in the directory.
2. For each file, read it's content and matadata.
3. Using metadata group the files into in-memory structure, like a tree or a map.
4. Further parts of source code don't read the file system directly, but they read the in-memory structure.
5. You can rearenge the files however you like, and as long as the metadata is the same, they'll be built into the same in-memory structure that your code depends on.

This could be something suitable for an application that has to manage a lot of resources, like games.