<p>There seem to be many ways to define <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern" rel="noreferrer">singletons</a> in Python. Is there a consensus opinion on Stack&nbsp;Overflow?</p>

Being relatively new to Python I'm not sure what the most common idiom is, but the simplest thing I can think of is just using a module instead of a class. What would have been instance methods on your class become just functions in the module and any data just becomes variables in the module instead of members of the class. I suspect this is the pythonic approach to solving the type of problem that people use singletons for.
If you really want a singleton class, there's a reasonable implementation described on the
first hit on Google
for "Python singleton", specifically:
```
```
class Singleton:
    __single = None
    def __init__( self ):
        if Singleton.__single:
            raise Singleton.__single
        Singleton.__single = self
```
```
That seems to do the trick.