Design Philosophy

Pure Syntactic Sugar

mypantry does not do anything you can’t do with the standard library. It is syntactic sugar over importlib.metadata and importlib.import_module.

What it saves you: scattered try/except blocks, boolean flags, inconsistent error messages, manual module name resolution.

Extreme Lightness

~300 lines of Python in one file. Zero external dependencies.

File

Lines

Purpose

__init__.py

25

Module-as-instance bootstrap

_registry.py

303

The entire public API

Total

328

Every line earns its place.

Zero Configuration

No config files. No pyproject.toml scanning. No setup calls. No plugin registration. import pantry and go.

This was a deliberate architectural change in v0.5.0. Earlier versions depended on pyproject.toml, which broke when the package was installed (Docker, pip install). Now Pantry uses importlib.metadata directly — it works in any context where Python runs.

Zero Magic

  • No monkey-patching of sys.meta_path or import hooks

  • No background threads or async operations

  • No lazy loading of external deps — has() is a metadata check, get()/[] do a real import

  • The one “magic” thing: sys.modules[__name__] = instance (well-known Python idiom)

Clear Error Messages

RuntimeError: Package 'pillow' is not available. Install with: pip install pillow

RuntimeError: analyze requires: pandas. Install with: pip install pandas

No stack traces to decode. The error tells you what is missing and how to fix it.

Two Distinct Purposes

  1. External dependencies — check and import any installed package

  2. Own modules (lazy import) — break circular imports by deferring resolution

These share the pantry["key"] accessor but are otherwise independent. has(), get(), report() only operate on external dependencies.

Bridge, Not Framework

The lazy import feature is a bridge toward PEP 690. When PEP 690 is available:

# Before
pantry.lazy_import("myapp.models.User")
User = pantry["myapp.models.User"]

# After (PEP 690)
from myapp.models import User

mypantry does not try to be a complete lazy import framework.