PrintYou have already used a number of packages in Python, primarily the arcpy package, but you are likely to have encountered others, such as sys, csv, which are a part of the Python standard library, or perhaps numpy and matplotlib, which are auxiliary libraries. In the previous section of this lesson, you learned about the tkinter and PyQT libraries as we built a Python graphical User Interface (GUI). In order to use these packages you had to use the import statement to make the additional methods they provide available to your code, for example:
import arcpy
You also created modules of your own that you imported into other scripts. You simply constructed a .py file and used the import statement in order to use it, and that is all Python requires for a module to be created. Creating such a module is straightforward - all your code was contained in a single .py file, you placed the file in the same folder as the program that would use it, and you imported into that program and used its functions. You may be wondering how a module is different from a package, since they are imported the same way. The difference is that a package is a collection of modules set up for easier distribution. While some projects may consist of one simple module, you will find that if you are building a project of any complexity, more than one .py file will be required, and potentially other files as well, such as configuration files or images.
In the next section, we will look at what exactly can be imported into Python. Later in the lesson, we will demonstrate the pip and conda package and environment managers as well as the Anaconda Python distribution based on conda. The section contains several optional subsections in which we package the Locations From Web Services application from the walkthrough and upload it to distribution sites. As in Lesson 1, we recommend that you only perform what is described in these optional sections yourself if you have time left at the end of the lesson.