I've been trying to find information about accessing non-py files from within a built pex, and haven't been able to find much. So my app has translation files, as well as some template files to be used with Jinja, and if I build with pants the absolute path (e.g.

os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)), TEMPLATE_DIR)))

) the path always starts with the

.pex

file as if it were a directory. Resulting in something like:

/app/server.pex/data/something

, but

server.pex

is not a directory and any

open()

call to a file with this directory prefix will cause an IOError.