Reloading a Module

By default module will be loaded only once even though we are importing multiple multiple times.

Demo Program for module reloading:

import time

from imp import reload

import module1

time.sleep(30)

reload(module1)

time.sleep(30)

reload(module1)

print("This is test file")

Note: In the above program, everytime updated version of module1 will be available to our program.

module1.py:
print("This is from module1"

test.py

import module1

print("This is test module")

Output:

This is from module1

This is test module

In the above program test module will be loaded only once even though we are importing multiple times.

The problem in this approach is after loading a module if it is updated outside then updated version of module1 is not available to our program.

We can solve this problem by reloading module explicitly based on our requirement. We can reload by using reload() function of imp module.

import imp
imp.reload(module1)

test.py:

import module1

from imp import reload

reload(module1)

print("This is test module")

In the above program module1 will be loaded 4 times in that 1 time by default and 3 times explicitly. In this case output is

This is from module1

This is test module

The main advantage of explicit module reloading is we can ensure that updated version is always available to our program.

Reloading a Module