tl;dr: Use imp.load_source. I've been hacking on a tool on and off that needs to load Python code from badly named files (eg, "master.cfg"). To my surprise, there wasn't an obvious way to do this. My "go to" method of doing this is with execfile. For example, this will load the contents of master.cfg into "m", with each top level object as a key: m = {} execfile("master.cfg", m) This works well enough for simple cases, but what happens when you try to load a module that loads other modules? It turns out that execfile has a nasty limitation of requiring modules that aren't in sys.path to be in the same directory as the file that calls execfile. You can't even chdir your way around this, you have to copy the files you need to the caller's directory. (We actually have some production code that does this. Someone in #python on Freenode suggested using importlib. That seemed like a fine idea, especially after recently watching Brett Cannon's "How Import Works" talk. Unfortunately, Python 2.7's importlib only has a single method which can only load a module by name. Eventually I came across a Stack Overflow post that pointed me at imp.load_source. This function is similar to execfile in that it loads Python code from a named file. However, it properly handles imports without the need to copy files around. It also has the nice added bonus of returning a module rather than throwing objects into a dict. I ended up with code like this, to load the contents of "foo/bar/master.cfg": >>> import os, sys >>> os.chdir("foo/bar") >>> sys.path.insert(0, "") # Needed to ensure that the current directory is looked at when importing >>> m = imp.load_source("buildbot.master.cfg", "master.cfg") Problem solved!