Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Site and User Customization

Python provides a specific “hook” to let each site customize some aspects of Python’s behavior at the start of each run. Customization by each single user is not enabled by default, but Python specifies how programs that want to run user-provided code at startup can explicitly request such customization.

The site and sitecustomize Modules

Python loads standard module site just before the main script. If Python is run with option -S, Python does not load site. -S allows faster startup but saddles the main script with initialization chores. site’s tasks are:

• Putting sys.path in standard form (absolute paths, no duplicates).

• Interpreting each .pth file found in the Python home directory, adding entries to sys.path, and/or importing modules, as each .pth file indicates.

• Adding built-ins used to display information in interactive sessions (quit, exit, copyright, credits, and license).

• Setting the default Unicode encoding to 'ascii'. site’s source code includes two blocks, each guarded by if 0:, one to set the default encoding to be locale-dependent, and the other to completely disable any default encoding between Unicode and plain strings. You may optionally edit site.py to select either block.

• Trying to import sitecustomize (should import sitecustomize raise an ImportError exception, site catches and ignores it). sitecustomize is the module that each site’s installation can optionally use for further site-specific customization beyond site’s tasks. It is generally ...