If you are writing an application of any size, it will most likely require a number of files to run – files which could be stored in a variety of possible locations. Furthermore, you will probably want to be able to change the location of those files when debugging and testing. You may even want to store those files somewhere other than the user's hard drive.

Any engineer worth his salt will recognise that the file locations should be stored in some kind of configuration file and the code to read the files in question should be factored out so that it isn't just scattered at points where data is read or written. In this post I'll present a way of doing just that by creating a virtual filesystem with PyFilesystem.

You'll need the most recent version of PyFilesystem from SVN to run this code. continue reading…