What is __name__ in Python?

You’ve most likely seen the following piece of code at the bottom of a Python script:

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:

You've most likely seen the following piece of code at the bottom of a script:

if __name__ == '__main__':
   # some code here

While this line of code may seem mundane, it's actually quite powerful! It allows you to run python code as standalone scripts or import them as modules.

How does it work?

The __name__ variable is a special "dunder" or magic variables in Python. Dunder stands for "double underscore", hence the two underscores on both sides.

Dunder variables hold special meaning in Python. The value of the __name__ dunder variable depends on how you execute the script.

If you run your script from the command line, the __name__ has the value __main__. If you import it, it will contain the name of the script.

Let's see how this works through code.

A simple example

Suppose you're making a simple greeter module. You want it to behave as follows:

• When it's run as a standalone script, it asks the name of the user and prints "Hi, {user}!". It repeats this until the program exits.
• When it's imported, it exposes a greet function that can create a greeting given a name

Seems simple enough! Let's code it.

# greeter.py

function greet(name):
   print(f'Hi, {name}!')

print('__name__ is:', __name__)

if __name__ == '__main__':
   while True:
      print("What's your name?")
      name = input('> ')

      if name == 'q':
        break

      greeter(name)

When you execute this script, you'll see the following output:

__name__ is: __main__
What's your name?
> Adrian
Hi, Adrian!

The magic happens before the code runs. Python assigns the value __main__ to __name__ since the script is ran standalone.

Importing our greeter function

What happens then if you import this script as a module from another script?

# client.py

from greeter import greet

names = ['Jeff', 'Annie', 'Britta']

for name in names:
   greet(name)

When you run this, you should see the following output:

__name__ is: greeter
Hi, Jeff!
Hi, Annie!
Hi, Britta!

Since we imported greeter as a module, Python assigned the name of the module, i.e. greeter, as the value of __name__. Due to this, the code block inside __main__ never gets executed.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You made a Python script that you can execute standalone or as a module. All you had to do was to include the following if statement:

if __name__ == '__main__':
 # some code here

You can find the sample code used in this article right here.

As a recap, this works because when you run a Python script, the __name__ dunder variable is:

• __main__ if you run the script from the command line
• The name of the module if you import it from another script

I hope this short tutorial was helpful!