SYS_PATH_CONF

The SYS_PATH_CONF configuration allows you explicitly specify which paths you want to include in your project's sys.path. Doing so can allow users to import modules and packages from sources outside of their direct project.

If this option is not specified, Prism throws a warning and automatically adds the project directory

To see why this is useful, suppose you had the following directory structure:

all_prism_projects/
  |- prism_project_1/
    |- prism_project.py
    |- modules/...
    |- utils1.py
  |- prism_project_2/
    |- prism_project.py
    |- modules/...
    |- utils2.py
  |- prism_project_2/
    |- prism_project.py
    |- modules/..
    |- utils2.py
  |- common_utils.py

By default, each project directory is added to each Prism project's sys.path at runtime. That means that prism_project_1 can access utils1.py, prism_project_2 can access utils2.py, and so on. However, the parent directory (i.e., all_prism_projects/) is not added to the project's sys.path by default, so common_utils.py would not be accessible to any of the projects.

This can easily be remedied with SYS_PATH_CONF. For example:

# all_prism_projects/prism_project_1/prism_project.py

...
SYS_PATH_CONF = [
    Path(__file__).parent,
    Path(__file__).parent.parent # added the parent path!
]
...

Now, a module in prism_project_1 can import common_utils at runtime:

# all_prism_projects/prism_project_1/modules/example_module.py

import prism_project    # this is OK since project directory is in sys.path
import common_utils     # this is OK since all_prism_projects/ is in sys.path
import prism.task

class ExampleTask(prism.task.PrismTask)
    ...

Important: we recommend specifying paths as relative paths rather than absolute paths (i.e., hard-coded string paths). This enables reproducibility across different machines.

More information on sys.path can be found here.