site

Append module search paths for third-party packages to sys.path.

* This module is automatically imported during initialization. *

In earlier versions of Python (up to 1.5a3), scripts or modules that needed to use site-specific modules would place ``import site’’ somewhere near the top of their code. Because of the automatic import, this is no longer necessary (but code that does it still works).

This will append site-specific paths to the module search path. On Unix (including Mac OSX), it starts with sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix (if different) and appends lib/python<version>/site-packages as well as lib/site-python. On other platforms (such as Windows), it tries each of the prefixes directly, as well as with lib/site-packages appended. The resulting directories, if they exist, are appended to sys.path, and also inspected for path configuration files.

A path configuration file is a file whose name has the form <package>.pth; its contents are additional directories (one per line) to be added to sys.path. Non-existing directories (or non-directories) are never added to sys.path; no directory is added to sys.path more than once. Blank lines and lines beginning with ‘#’ are skipped. Lines starting with ‘import’ are executed.

For example, suppose sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix are set to /usr/local and there is a directory /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages with three subdirectories, foo, bar and spam, and two path configuration files, foo.pth and bar.pth. Assume foo.pth contains the following:

# foo package configuration foo bar bletch

and bar.pth contains:

# bar package configuration bar

Then the following directories are added to sys.path, in this order:

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/bar /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/foo

Note that bletch is omitted because it doesn’t exist; bar precedes foo because bar.pth comes alphabetically before foo.pth; and spam is omitted because it is not mentioned in either path configuration file.

After these path manipulations, an attempt is made to import a module named sitecustomize, which can perform arbitrary additional site-specific customizations. If this import fails with an ImportError exception, it is silently ignored.

Functions

abs__file__() Set all module’ __file__ attribute to an absolute path
addpackage(sitedir, name, known_paths) Process a .pth file within the site-packages directory: For each line in the file, either combine it with sitedir to a path and add that to known_paths, or execute it if it starts with ‘import ‘.
addsitedir(sitedir[, known_paths]) Add ‘sitedir’ argument to sys.path if missing and handle .pth files in
addsitepackages(known_paths) Add site-packages (and possibly site-python) to sys.path
addusersitepackages(known_paths) Add a per user site-package to sys.path
aliasmbcs() On Windows, some default encodings are not provided by Python, while they are always available as “mbcs” in each locale.
check_enableusersite() Check if user site directory is safe for inclusion
execsitecustomize() Run custom site specific code, if available.
execusercustomize() Run custom user specific code, if available.
getsitepackages() Returns a list containing all global site-packages directories (and possibly site-python).
getuserbase() Returns the user base directory path.
getusersitepackages() Returns the user-specific site-packages directory path.
main()
makepath(*paths)
removeduppaths() Remove duplicate entries from sys.path along with making them
setBEGINLIBPATH() The OS/2 EMX port has optional extension modules that do double duty as DLLs (and must use the .DLL file extension) for other extensions.
setcopyright() Set ‘copyright’ and ‘credits’ in __builtin__
setencoding() Set the string encoding used by the Unicode implementation.
sethelper()
setquit() Define new builtins ‘quit’ and ‘exit’.