Python: Load module by its name

Question

I'm working on a django project that serves multiple sites; depending on the site I want to import different functionality from a different module; how do I import a module in Python if I have the name of its package and the module name itself as a string?

Answer 1

in Python generally, you can use __import__ builtin function or imp module features:

>>> sys1 = __import__("sys")
>>> import imp
>>> sys2 = imp.load_module("sys2", *imp.find_module("sys"))
>>> import sys
>>> sys is sys1 is sys2
True

Answer 2

Django has its own import function to get an objet from a string. From documentation :

django.utils.module_loading

Functions for working with Python modules.

 import_string(dotted_path) 

Imports a dotted module path and returns the attribute/class designated by the last name in the path. Raises ImportError if the import failed. For example:

 from django.utils.module_loading import import_string ValidationError = import_string('django.core.exceptions.ValidationError') 

is equivalent to:

 from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError