Python module path not found

Question

On our Openstack installation somethin awfully went wrong. Now python does not work properly any more. The module path is not found:

root@controller:/root# keystone token-get
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/keystone", line 6, in <module>
    from keystoneclient.shell import main
ImportError: No module named shell

If I add the module path via environment variable, this error disappears... (the other error does not matter in the moment)

root@controller:/root# export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
root@controller:/root# keystone token-get
Authorization Failed: Unable to establish connection to http://controller:35357/v2.0/tokens

Odd detail: Even without setting the environment variable python -m site seems to know the right path:

sys.path = [
'/root',
'/usr/lib/python2.7',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0',
]
USER_BASE: '/root/.local' (doesn't exist)
USER_SITE: '/root/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages' (doesn't exist)
ENABLE_USER_SITE: True

As python also does not work in Apache for the dashboard, it is not an option to set the environment variable with "export" every time. We need to fix the problem elsewhere.

Where is the python include path configured?

UPDATE:

The order of the lib paths seems to matter. This is working:

PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages; keystone token-get

and this is not working:

PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages; keystone token-get

Answer 1

Depending on your distro, two common places :

add export pythonpath=apath; another/one; export pythonpath=apath; another/one;

in /etc/profile will be system-wide or ~/.bash-profile will be user-specific