Question

When organising python project, this structure seems to be a standard way of doing it:

myproject\
    bin\
        myscript
    mypackage\
        __init__.py
        core.py
    tests\
        __init__.py
        mypackage_tests.py
setup.py

My question is, how do I import my core.py so I can use it in myscript?

both __init__.py files are empty.

Content of myscript:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from mypackage import core
if __name__ == '__main__':
    core.main()

Content of core.py

def main():
    print 'hello'

When I run myscript from inside myproject directory, I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/myscript", line 2, in <module>
    from mypackage import core
ImportError: No module named mypackage

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Usually, setup.py should install the package in a place where the Python interpreter can find it, so after installation import mypackage will work. To facilitate running the scripts in bin right from the development tree, I’d usually simply add a simlink to ../mypackage/ to the bin directory. Of course, this requires a filesystem supporting symlinks…