In this blog post, we will explore how to use the QDirDialog class in PyQt to create a directory selection dialog in Python applications. The QDirDialog class allows users to select a directory from their file system.

Prerequisites

To follow along with the examples in this post, you should have a basic understanding of Python and PyQt. If you are new to PyQt, I recommend checking out the PyQt documentation or tutorial to get started.

Getting Started

First, let’s import the necessary PyQt classes and modules:

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QPushButton, QVBoxLayout, QWidget, \
                            QLabel, QVBoxLayout, QMainWindow, QFileDialog
from PyQt5.QtCore import QDir

Next, let’s create a simple PyQt application with a button that triggers the directory selection dialog:

class MainWindow(QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

        self.setWindowTitle("Directory Selection")
        self.setGeometry(100, 100, 300, 200)
        layout = QVBoxLayout()

        self.select_button = QPushButton("Select Directory")
        self.select_button.clicked.connect(self.select_directory)
        layout.addWidget(self.select_button)

        self.selected_directory_label = QLabel("No directory selected")
        layout.addWidget(self.selected_directory_label)

        widget = QWidget()
        widget.setLayout(layout)
        self.setCentralWidget(widget)

    def select_directory(self):
        # Create a directory dialog and set initial directory to current directory
        directory_dialog = QFileDialog(self)
        directory_dialog.setFileMode(QFileDialog.Directory)
        directory_dialog.setOption(QFileDialog.ShowDirsOnly, True)

        if directory_dialog.exec_() == QFileDialog.Accepted:
            selected_directory = directory_dialog.selectedFiles()[0]
            self.selected_directory_label.setText(selected_directory)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QApplication([])
    window = MainWindow()
    window.show()
    app.exec_()

In the MainWindow class, we create a button that triggers the select_directory method when clicked. Inside the select_directory method, we create a QFileDialog dialog and set it to only show directories. Once a directory is selected by the user, we update the selected_directory_label with the selected directory.

Testing the Application

Save the code to a file (e.g., main.py) and run it in your Python environment. You should see a window with a button labeled “Select Directory”. Clicking on the button should open a file dialog where you can navigate through directories and select one. After selecting a directory, the selected directory path should be displayed below the button.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned how to use the QDirDialog class in PyQt to create a directory selection dialog. We created a simple PyQt application that allows users to select a directory and display the selected path. This can be a useful feature in applications that require users to choose a directory for file operations or application settings.