Table of Contents

• Usage

• Configuration

• Public API

• Contributing

• Code of Conduct

What is autopypath?

autopypath is a library that simplifies the management of the Python module search path (sys.path) for testing and development environments.

It automatically detects your project root (via .git, pyproject.toml, etc.) and intelligently adds source directories to sys.path at runtime.

It does not read .env files to derive PYTHONPATH because the semantics cannot be consistently interpreted across different operating systems.

For example, consider PYTHONPATH=src:test;lib:

• On POSIX, PYTHONPATH is separated by : → ["src", "test;lib"]

• On Windows, PYTHONPATH is separated by ; → ["src:test", "lib"]

• And the intent may have been ["src", "test", "lib"]

All of those interpretations are “reasonable”, so autopypath avoids guessing what was meant and instead uses pyproject.toml or autopypath.toml for configuration.

Installation

pip install autopypath

git clone https://github.com/JerilynFranz/python-autopypath.git
cd python-autopypath
pip install .

git clone https://github.com/JerilynFranz/python-autopypath.git
cd python-autopypath
python3 bootstrap.py
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows use .venv\Scripts\activate

Usage

Simply import autopypath at the top of your test script. It will automatically detect the project root and adjust sys.path accordingly (by default adding src, lib, src/tests, and tests directories if they exist).

It does not add . to sys.path by default to avoid conflicts with subdirectories that are NOT intended to be packages, but if you want to include the repo root directory, you can configure it via pyproject.toml or autopypath.toml.

Here is an example:

import autopypath  # <--- This line adjusts the sys.path
import pytest

# Now these imports work without installing the package
import mypackage.my_module

if __name__ == '__main__':
   pytest.main([__file__])

You can now run this file directly:

python tests/my_test_script.py

Configuration

autopypath automatically detects pyproject.toml. You can configure it by adding a [tool.autopypath] section.

Example `pyproject.toml`:

[tool.autopypath]
paths = ["lib", "src/tests", ".", "src"]

If you do not use pyproject.toml, you can create an autopypath.toml file either in your root directory or in subdirectories such as src or tests and it will be detected automatically. This can be useful for monorepos or multi-package repositories and allows customization of sys.path per sub-project or for detection of the project root in non-standard layouts.

Example `autopypath.toml`:

[tool.autopypath]
paths = ["src", "src/lib", "tests"]
repo_markers = {".git" = "dir"}

This file can be placed in the root of your project or in any directory that is a parent of your test scripts (but still inside the repo).