Finding the root of a project with pathlib

April 24, 2025

Every now and then I’m writing code deep in some Python project, and I realize that it would be nice to generate a file at the root of a project.

The following is the way I’m currently finding the root folder with pathlib:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from pathlib import Path
    project_root = next(
        p for p in Path(__file__).parents
        if (p / '.git').exists()
    )
    project_root.joinpath('output.text').write_text(...)

To explain what this does, let’s start on line 4:

  • Path(__file__) will create an absolute path to the file this Python code is in.
  • .parents is a generator that yields the parent folders of this path, so if this path is Path('/Users/example/projects/money_generator/src/cash/services/models.py') , it will generate:
    • Path('/Users/example/projects/money_generator/src/cash/services') then
    • Path('/Users/example/projects/money_generator/src/cash')
    • and so on
  • next() given an iterable, it will retrieve the next item in itIt can also return a default value if the iterable runs out of items.[docs]
  • p for p in Path(__file__).parents is a comprehension that will yield each parent of the current file.
  • (p / '.git').exists() given a path p , it will look to see if the git folder ( .git ) exists in that folder
  • So, next(p for p in Path(__file__).parents if (p / '.git').exists()) will return the first folder that contains a git repo in the parents of the current Python file.

How do you accomplish this task?

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