`importlib.metadata` – Accessing package metadata¶

Added in version 3.8.

Changed in version 3.10: importlib.metadata is no longer provisional.

Source code: Lib/importlib/metadata/__init__.py

importlib.metadata is a library that provides access to the metadata of an installed Distribution Package, such as its entry points or its top-level names (Import Packages, modules, if any). Built in part on Python’s import system, this library intends to replace similar functionality in the entry point API and metadata API of pkg_resources. Along with importlib.resources, this package can eliminate the need to use the older and less efficient pkg_resources package.

importlib.metadata operates on third-party distribution packages installed into Python’s site-packages directory via tools such as pip. Specifically, it works with distributions with discoverable dist-info or egg-info directories, and metadata defined by the Core metadata specifications.

Important

These are not necessarily equivalent to or correspond 1:1 with the top-level import package names that can be imported inside Python code. One distribution package can contain multiple import packages (and single modules), and one top-level import package may map to multiple distribution packages if it is a namespace package. You can use packages_distributions() to get a mapping between them.

By default, distribution metadata can live on the file system or in zip archives on sys.path. Through an extension mechanism, the metadata can live almost anywhere.

Overview¶

Let’s say you wanted to get the version string for a Distribution Package you’ve installed using pip. We start by creating a virtual environment and installing something into it:

$ python -m venv example
$ source example/bin/activate
(example) $ python -m pip install wheel

You can get the version string for wheel by running the following:

(example) $ python
>>> from importlib.metadata import version  
>>> version('wheel')  
'0.32.3'

You can also get a collection of entry points selectable by properties of the EntryPoint (typically ‘group’ or ‘name’), such as console_scripts, distutils.commands and others. Each group contains a collection of EntryPoint objects.

You can get the metadata for a distribution:

>>> list(metadata('wheel'))  
['Metadata-Version', 'Name', 'Version', 'Summary', 'Home-page', 'Author', 'Author-email', 'Maintainer', 'Maintainer-email', 'License', 'Project-URL', 'Project-URL', 'Project-URL', 'Keywords', 'Platform', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Classifier', 'Requires-Python', 'Provides-Extra', 'Requires-Dist', 'Requires-Dist']

You can also get a distribution’s version number, list its constituent files, and get a list of the distribution’s Distribution requirements.

exception importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError¶: Subclass of ModuleNotFoundError raised by several functions in this module when queried for a distribution package which is not installed in the current Python environment.

Functional API¶

This package provides the following functionality via its public API.

Entry points¶

importlib.metadata.entry_points(**select_params)¶

Returns a EntryPoints instance describing entry points for the current environment. Any given keyword parameters are passed to the select() method for comparison to the attributes of the individual entry point definitions.

Note: it is not currently possible to query for entry points based on their EntryPoint.dist attribute (as different Distribution instances do not currently compare equal, even if they have the same attributes)

class importlib.metadata.EntryPoints¶

Details of a collection of installed entry points.

Also provides a .groups attribute that reports all identified entry point groups, and a .names attribute that reports all identified entry point names.

class importlib.metadata.EntryPoint¶

Details of an installed entry point.

Each EntryPoint instance has .name, .group, and .value attributes and a .load() method to resolve the value. There are also .module, .attr, and .extras attributes for getting the components of the .value attribute, and .dist for obtaining information regarding the distribution package that provides the entry point.

Query all entry points:

>>> eps = entry_points()  

The entry_points() function returns a EntryPoints object, a collection of all EntryPoint objects with names and groups attributes for convenience:

>>> sorted(eps.groups)  
['console_scripts', 'distutils.commands', 'distutils.setup_keywords', 'egg_info.writers', 'setuptools.installation']

EntryPoints has a select() method to select entry points matching specific properties. Select entry points in the console_scripts group:

>>> scripts = eps.select(group='console_scripts')  

Equivalently, since entry_points() passes keyword arguments through to select:

>>> scripts = entry_points(group='console_scripts')  

Pick out a specific script named “wheel” (found in the wheel project):

>>> 'wheel' in scripts.names  
True
>>> wheel = scripts['wheel']  

Equivalently, query for that entry point during selection:

>>> (wheel,) = entry_points(group='console_scripts', name='wheel')  
>>> (wheel,) = entry_points().select(group='console_scripts', name='wheel')  

Inspect the resolved entry point:

>>> wheel  
EntryPoint(name='wheel', value='wheel.cli:main', group='console_scripts')
>>> wheel.module  
'wheel.cli'
>>> wheel.attr  
'main'
>>> wheel.extras  
[]
>>> main = wheel.load()  
>>> main  
<function main at 0x103528488>

The group and name are arbitrary values defined by the package author and usually a client will wish to resolve all entry points for a particular group. Read the setuptools docs for more information on entry points, their definition, and usage.

Changed in version 3.12: The “selectable” entry points were introduced in importlib_metadata 3.6 and Python 3.10. Prior to those changes, entry_points accepted no parameters and always returned a dictionary of entry points, keyed by group. With importlib_metadata 5.0 and Python 3.12, entry_points always returns an EntryPoints object. See backports.entry_points_selectable for compatibility options.

Changed in version 3.13: EntryPoint objects no longer present a tuple-like interface (__getitem__()).

Distribution metadata¶

importlib.metadata.metadata(distribution_name)¶

Return the distribution metadata corresponding to the named distribution package as a PackageMetadata instance.

Raises PackageNotFoundError if the named distribution package is not installed in the current Python environment.

class importlib.metadata.PackageMetadata¶

A concrete implementation of the PackageMetadata protocol.

In addition to providing the defined protocol methods and attributes, subscripting the instance is equivalent to calling the get() method.

Every Distribution Package includes some metadata, which you can extract using the metadata() function:

>>> wheel_metadata = metadata('wheel')  

The keys of the returned data structure name the metadata keywords, and the values are returned unparsed from the distribution metadata:

>>> wheel_metadata['Requires-Python']  
'>=2.7, !=3.0.*, !=3.1.*, !=3.2.*, !=3.3.*'

PackageMetadata also presents a json attribute that returns all the metadata in a JSON-compatible form per PEP 566:

>>> wheel_metadata.json['requires_python']
'>=2.7, !=3.0.*, !=3.1.*, !=3.2.*, !=3.3.*'

The full set of available metadata is not described here. See the PyPA Core metadata specification for additional details.

Changed in version 3.10: The Description is now included in the metadata when presented through the payload. Line continuation characters have been removed.

The json attribute was added.

Distribution versions¶

importlib.metadata.version(distribution_name)¶

Return the installed distribution package version for the named distribution package.

Raises PackageNotFoundError if the named distribution package is not installed in the current Python environment.

The version() function is the quickest way to get a Distribution Package’s version number, as a string:

>>> version('wheel')  
'0.32.3'

Distribution files¶

importlib.metadata.files(distribution_name)¶

Return the full set of files contained within the named distribution package.

Raises PackageNotFoundError if the named distribution package is not installed in the current Python environment.

Returns None if the distribution is found but the installation database records reporting the files associated with the distribuion package are missing.

class importlib.metadata.PackagePath¶: A pathlib.PurePath derived object with additional dist, size, and hash properties corresponding to the distribution package’s installation metadata for that file.

The files() function takes a Distribution Package name and returns all of the files installed by this distribution. Each file is reported as a PackagePath instance. For example:

>>> util = [p for p in files('wheel') if 'util.py' in str(p)][0]  
>>> util  
PackagePath('wheel/util.py')
>>> util.size  
859
>>> util.dist  
<importlib.metadata._hooks.PathDistribution object at 0x101e0cef0>
>>> util.hash  
<FileHash mode: sha256 value: bYkw5oMccfazVCoYQwKkkemoVyMAFoR34mmKBx8R1NI>

Once you have the file, you can also read its contents:

>>> print(util.read_text())  
import base64
import sys
...
def as_bytes(s):
    if isinstance(s, text_type):
        return s.encode('utf-8')
    return s

You can also use the locate() method to get the absolute path to the file:

>>> util.locate()  
PosixPath('/home/gustav/example/lib/site-packages/wheel/util.py')

In the case where the metadata file listing files (RECORD or SOURCES.txt) is missing, files() will return None. The caller may wish to wrap calls to files() in always_iterable or otherwise guard against this condition if the target distribution is not known to have the metadata present.

Distribution requirements¶

importlib.metadata.requires(distribution_name)¶

Return the declared dependency specifiers for the named distribution package.

Raises PackageNotFoundError if the named distribution package is not installed in the current Python environment.

To get the full set of requirements for a Distribution Package, use the requires() function:

>>> requires('wheel')  
["pytest (>=3.0.0) ; extra == 'test'", "pytest-cov ; extra == 'test'"]

Mapping import to distribution packages¶

importlib.metadata.packages_distributions()¶

Return a mapping from the top level module and import package names found via sys.meta_path to the names of the distribution packages (if any) that provide the corresponding files.

To allow for namespace packages (which may have members provided by multiple distribution packages), each top level import name maps to a list of distribution names rather than mapping directly to a single name.

A convenience method to resolve the Distribution Package name (or names, in the case of a namespace package) that provide each importable top-level Python module or Import Package:

>>> packages_distributions()
{'importlib_metadata': ['importlib-metadata'], 'yaml': ['PyYAML'], 'jaraco': ['jaraco.classes', 'jaraco.functools'], ...}

Some editable installs, do not supply top-level names, and thus this function is not reliable with such installs.

Added in version 3.10.

Distributions¶

importlib.metadata.distribution(distribution_name)¶

Return a Distribution instance describing the named distribution package.

Raises PackageNotFoundError if the named distribution package is not installed in the current Python environment.

class importlib.metadata.Distribution¶

Details of an installed distribution package.

Note: different Distribution instances do not currently compare equal, even if they relate to the same installed distribution and accordingly have the same attributes.

While the module level API described above is the most common and convenient usage, you can get all of that information from the Distribution class. Distribution is an abstract object that represents the metadata for a Python Distribution Package. You can get the concreate Distribution subclass instance for an installed distribution package by calling the distribution() function:

>>> from importlib.metadata import distribution  
>>> dist = distribution('wheel')  
>>> type(dist)  
<class 'importlib.metadata.PathDistribution'>

Thus, an alternative way to get the version number is through the Distribution instance:

>>> dist.version  
'0.32.3'

There are all kinds of additional metadata available on Distribution instances:

>>> dist.metadata['Requires-Python']  
'>=2.7, !=3.0.*, !=3.1.*, !=3.2.*, !=3.3.*'
>>> dist.metadata['License']  
'MIT'

For editable packages, an origin property may present PEP 610 metadata:

>>> dist.origin.url
'file:///path/to/wheel-0.32.3.editable-py3-none-any.whl'

The full set of available metadata is not described here. See the PyPA Core metadata specification for additional details.

Added in version 3.13: The .origin property was added.

Distribution Discovery¶

By default, this package provides built-in support for discovery of metadata for file system and zip file Distribution Packages. This metadata finder search defaults to sys.path, but varies slightly in how it interprets those values from how other import machinery does. In particular:

importlib.metadata does not honor bytes objects on sys.path.
importlib.metadata will incidentally honor pathlib.Path objects on sys.path even though such values will be ignored for imports.

Extending the search algorithm¶

Because Distribution Package metadata is not available through sys.path searches, or package loaders directly, the metadata for a distribution is found through import system finders. To find a distribution package’s metadata, importlib.metadata queries the list of meta path finders on sys.meta_path.

By default importlib.metadata installs a finder for distribution packages found on the file system. This finder doesn’t actually find any distributions, but it can find their metadata.

The abstract class importlib.abc.MetaPathFinder defines the interface expected of finders by Python’s import system. importlib.metadata extends this protocol by looking for an optional find_distributions callable on the finders from sys.meta_path and presents this extended interface as the DistributionFinder abstract base class, which defines this abstract method:

@abc.abstractmethod
def find_distributions(context=DistributionFinder.Context()):
    """Return an iterable of all Distribution instances capable of
    loading the metadata for packages for the indicated ``context``.
    """

The DistributionFinder.Context object provides .path and .name properties indicating the path to search and name to match and may supply other relevant context.

What this means in practice is that to support finding distribution package metadata in locations other than the file system, subclass Distribution and implement the abstract methods. Then from a custom finder, return instances of this derived Distribution in the find_distributions() method.

Example¶

Consider for example a custom finder that loads Python modules from a database:

class DatabaseImporter(importlib.abc.MetaPathFinder):
    def __init__(self, db):
        self.db = db

    def find_spec(self, fullname, target=None) -> ModuleSpec:
        return self.db.spec_from_name(fullname)

sys.meta_path.append(DatabaseImporter(connect_db(...)))

That importer now presumably provides importable modules from a database, but it provides no metadata or entry points. For this custom importer to provide metadata, it would also need to implement DistributionFinder:

from importlib.metadata import DistributionFinder

class DatabaseImporter(DistributionFinder):
    ...

    def find_distributions(self, context=DistributionFinder.Context()):
        query = dict(name=context.name) if context.name else {}
        for dist_record in self.db.query_distributions(query):
            yield DatabaseDistribution(dist_record)

In this way, query_distributions would return records for each distribution served by the database matching the query. For example, if requests-1.0 is in the database, find_distributions would yield a DatabaseDistribution for Context(name='requests') or Context(name=None).

For the sake of simplicity, this example ignores context.path. The path attribute defaults to sys.path and is the set of import paths to be considered in the search. A DatabaseImporter could potentially function without any concern for a search path. Assuming the importer does no partitioning, the “path” would be irrelevant. In order to illustrate the purpose of path, the example would need to illustrate a more complex DatabaseImporter whose behavior varied depending on sys.path/PYTHONPATH. In that case, the find_distributions should honor the context.path and only yield Distributions pertinent to that path.

DatabaseDistribution, then, would look something like:

class DatabaseDistribution(importlib.metadata.Distribution):
    def __init__(self, record):
        self.record = record

    def read_text(self, filename):
        """
        Read a file like "METADATA" for the current distribution.
        """
        if filename == "METADATA":
            return f"""Name: {self.record.name}
Version: {self.record.version}
"""
        if filename == "entry_points.txt":
            return "\n".join(
              f"""[{ep.group}]\n{ep.name}={ep.value}"""
              for ep in self.record.entry_points)

    def locate_file(self, path):
        raise RuntimeError("This distribution has no file system")

This basic implementation should provide metadata and entry points for packages served by the DatabaseImporter, assuming that the record supplies suitable .name, .version, and .entry_points attributes.

The DatabaseDistribution may also provide other metadata files, like RECORD (required for Distribution.files) or override the implementation of Distribution.files. See the source for more inspiration.

`importlib.metadata` – Accessing package metadata¶

Overview¶

Functional API¶

Entry points¶

Distribution metadata¶

Distribution versions¶

Distribution files¶

Distribution requirements¶

Mapping import to distribution packages¶

Distributions¶

Distribution Discovery¶

Extending the search algorithm¶

Example¶

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importlib.metadata – Accessing package metadata¶

Overview¶

Functional API¶

Entry points¶

Distribution metadata¶

Distribution versions¶

Distribution files¶

Distribution requirements¶

Mapping import to distribution packages¶

Distributions¶

Distribution Discovery¶

Extending the search algorithm¶

Example¶

`importlib.metadata` – Accessing package metadata¶