[Django]-Get absolute path of django app

So the accepted answer usually works fine. However, for

• namespace packages with multiple paths, or
• apps which explicitly configure their paths in the config,

their intended path may not agree with the __file__ attribute of the module.

Django (1.7+) provides the AppConfig.path attribute – which I think is clearer even in simple cases, and which covers these edge cases too.

The application docs tell you how to get the AppConfig object. So to get AppConfig and print the path from it:

from django.apps import apps
print(apps.get_app_config('app_label').path)

Edit:
Altered example for how to use get_app_config to remove dots, which seems to have been confusing. Here are the docs for reference.

Normally, this is what I add in my settings.py file so I can reference the project root.

import os.path

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

This method will get the directory of any python file.

În newer versions of Django (I don’t know when it started, I assume it’s there for many years now), the default settingy.py contains an entry

# Build paths inside the project like this: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...)
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

which you can use by importing the settings file like this

import os    
from my_project_name.settings import BASE_DIR

os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...)

Python3.4 and above comes with standard library pathlib.

from pathlib import Path
import appmodule

pth = Path(appmodule.__file__).parent / 'fixtures'
if pth.exists():
     "Your code here"

parent will give you the path of your app directory, and / will append fixtures as path.

Keep in mind that appname.__path__ is a list:

import appname
APP_ROOT = os.path.abspath(appname.__path__[0])
file_path = os.path.join(APP_ROOT, "some_file.txt")

Django auto-generated setting file has the following that you can use as well

BASE_DIR = Path(file).resolve().parent.parent