Where is Django installed ?

Summary

It’s useful to know where Django is for a number of reasons – customising admin templates for instance.

Todays Learning Point

Django is generally going to be installed in the site-packages directory of the Python directory you’re using. If you’re on an unfamiliar machine however where that is may not be immediately obvious so here’s a way to be sure.

If you need to know where the Django installation is you can do that from within Python quite easily.

>>> import django
>>> print django.__path__
['/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django']


Why __path__

__path__ is a special attribute of Python packages; it’s initialized to hold the name of the directory holding the package’s __init__.py. To put that in blunter terms __path__ is going to tell you where the files that make up the package are – in this case Django.