What is the purpose of "_private.py" file when making custom management commands in Django?

Question

Hi guys I have been trying to find a reason for the existence of the _private.py file when you are declaring custom management commands. I tried to look on many pages and forums and I did not find anything relevant.

The most explicit documentation about this file that I found, is on the official documentation which states the following:

The _private.py module will not be available as a management command.

However that really does not give us so much information about what is the purpose of that file, or why would I really need to declare that, does any one of you guys know?

Answer 1

The name _private.py isn't a special, but its leading underscore is (from the link in your question, bold added):

To do this, add a management/commands directory to the application. Django will register a manage.py command for each Python module in that directory whose name doesn’t begin with an underscore.

As to why you'd want a file there that doesn't get registered as a command, maybe you want to factor out some behaviour and use it in two modules that do get registered as commands.