How can a Python module be imported from a URL?

Question

As an experiment, I want to see how to import a Python module from a URL. The hypothetical goal here would be to import from a central location which keeps the modules up-to-date. How could this be done?

My attempt is as follows:

>>> import urllib
>>> 
>>> def import_URL(URL):
...     exec urllib.urlopen(URL) in globals()
... 
>>> import_URL("https://cdn.rawgit.com/wdbm/shijian/master/shijian.py")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in import_URL
TypeError: exec: arg 1 must be a string, file, or code object

---

EDIT: Martijn Pieters identified a fix for the example code that results in the string representation of the remote module. The resulting code is as follows:

import urllib
def import_URL(URL):
    exec urllib.urlopen(URL).read() in globals()

Answer 1

Yes you can.

Just fetch the module with the url and once you have it store it as a string where you can run it using eval()

Using urllib and eval it can be done easily:

import urllib.request
a = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
eval(a.read())

Do note that some modules (such as Pygame and Pydub) require runtimes and they could not be run using eval() because of the missing runtimes.

Good luck with your project, I hope I helped.