Question

For my gae python project, I’d like to import an external library named ‘vobject’. What’s the correct way to import it in my .py files?

The project’s readme says that in order to install it, you need to run

  python setup.py install

Additionally, vobject requires the ‘dateutil’ package.

Since this is going to run on GAE, I thought I should copy both libs over into my project instead of running the install script to make use of it in my code.

But I’m getting a bunch of import errors and I’m not sure what the correct convention is for external gae/python libs.

utc = dateutil.tz.tzutc()
## error produced:
File "myGaeProject/external/vobject/icalendar.py", line 47, in <module>
NameError: name 'dateutil' is not defined

Because of the way I’ve structured my project, I changed icalendar.py’s import structure from:

import dateutil.rrule
import dateutil.tz

to:

import external.dateutil.rrule
import external.dateutil.tz

I also tried:

from external.dateutil import *

What’s the correct import mechanism for a project structured like so:

-myGaeProject

--external
----__init__.py    

----dateutil
------__init__.py
------tz.py
------rrule.py
------[more dateutil files]

----vobject
------__init__.py
------base.py    
------icalendar.py    

--handlers
------__init__.py
------mainHandler.py

Answer 1

Don’t modify the library. If you want to put all your libraries in external, you need to add external to your python path before you attempt to import libraries from there:

import os
import sys
sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'external'))
import some_external_library