🎉 First Python Package 🎉

1/19/25

After many months of on and off hacking, I’ve finally published version 0.1.0 of ourtils, a Python package I created.

• GitHub repo: https://github.com/ayoskovich/ourtils
• Documentation: https://ourtils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

When I set out to write this package, had 3 primary objectives:

1. Put all the useful code I’ve written over the years into a single place
   • I am increasingly frustrated having to copy / paste or resolve the same problem over and over again, so this was an exercise to make my code more re-usable
2. Gain experience writing reusable and maintanable code
   • For testing, I used pytest which integrates really well into VSCode with a launch.json file
   • I initially was building everything with requirements.txt files and managing the pyproject.toml myself but ran in to dependency issues that were over my head. I started using poetry to manage my package dependencies and so far it’s been much easier.
3. Learn more CI/CD with GitHub Actions
   • This was straightforward, and now I have an action to lint and test my code
   • The documentation also automagically deploys when there are new PRs and when things are merged

Something important I learned was that running python scripts directly like this:

$ python3 myscript.py

…is fine for small sandboxy scripts, but the moment you’re importing other local code, you should STOP running like that and do this instead:

$ python3 -m myscript

The -m flag will run the file as a module. I’ve often found myself getting the dreaded ImportError: attempted relative import in non-package or something similar. Historically, I’ve fixed this two ways:

1. Do something gross with sys.path:

import sys
from os import path
sys.path.append(path.dirname(path.dirname(path.abspath(__file__))))

2. Lose all sanity and resort to try / except

try:
    from .helpers import myfunc
except ImportError:
    from helpers import myfunc

Both of which are no longer allowed to be a part of my life, and I’ll be using the -m flag much more.

I’ll bump to version 1.0.0 once I do more battle testing, but now that I’ve gotten over the setup/deployment hump I can spend more time working on the actual code.