The regular zipimport module is limited to zip archives containing only regular python source files (.py) and compiled byte-code (.pyo and .pyc).

This module serves as a replacement for zipimport which allows the zip archive to contain extension modules (.so, .pyd). When the module is imported, the extension module is deflated into a temporary directory and then loaded by the usual mechanisms.

Currently only Python 3.3 or later is supported. There are no additional dependencies.

Replace the regular zipimport.zipimporter path hook in sys.path_hooks with pydzipimport.PydZipImporter. Then be sure to clear the path importer cache (sys.path_importer_cache) of any stale entries.

To automate this task, an install function is provided:

import pydzipimport
pydzipimport.install()

Now extension modules contained within a zip file can be imported.