How to Change the Working Directory in Python

If you have worked on a Python application where you had data in another folder, you would have used a command-line tool like cd to change directories. In this tutorial, we will learn a more Pythonic way of changing directories.

Changing directories using the os.chdir function

The easiest way to change the working directory in Python is importing the os package and calling the chdir() function. The function takes in the target directory as an input parameter

Let us see an example

1. Get the current working directory

Let us first see the current working directory in Python. We can achieve this by calling the os.getcwd() function

import os
os.getcwd()

We get the following output when we execute the above two lines

/content

2. Get the contents of the current working directory

 We will now execute the function call to get the contents of the working directory. We can do this by calling the following function in Python

os.listdir()

We get the following output

['.config', 'sample_data']

3. Navigate to target directory

    We will now use the os.chdir() function to navigate to the ‘sample_data’ directory

os.chdir('sample_data')

  We can now again call the os.getcwd() function to verify if the directory was changed.

os.chdir('sample_data')

  We get the following output

/content/sample_data   

Changing the Working Directory using Context Manager

The second approach to change the working directory is using a context manager. Let us see an example and the benefits of using a context manager.

In the previous example, the working directory changes even outside a function. Most of the time, we would want to run out logic inside a function and once we exit the function, we would like to return the previous working directory. A context manager helps us to achieve this without any errors

1. Import the libraries

Let us first import the libraries

from contextlib import contextmanager
import os

2. Function to change directories

We will now implement a function call change_path() using the @contextmanager decorator function.

@contextmanager
def change_path(newdir):
    old_path = os.getcwd()
    os.chdir(os.path.expanduser(newdir))
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        os.chdir(old_path)


3. Call the function change_path

with change_path('sample_data'):
    print(os.getcwd())

We get the following output

/content/sample_data

If we now call the os.getcwd() we get the following output

/content

As you can see outside the context of change_path we are in the previous directory. We can do the processing by changing the directory inside the context of the change_path function

Summary

In this tutorial we looked at two ways to change the working directory in Python.

1. Using getcwd() we can change the directory, but the directory is changed also outside the scope of a function
2. Using contextmanager we can change the directory in an error-free manner and outside the context of a function, the directory is not changed.