Python cli module import not found

Question

I am trying to run a packaged cli, which does dynamic imports. When I run the code through the main cli script it works as expected. However after I package the code up using setup.py sdist and then install the dist tar with pip. The cli itself gives an import error ImportError: No module named . All of the modules are in the same folder as the cli.py file.

This is how I have created my main called cli.py

def main():
    args = docopt(__doc__, version="1.0")
    argv = [args['<command>']] + args['<args>']
    module = importlib.import_module(args['<command>'])
    print(docopt(module.__doc__, argv=argv))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

And my setup.py looks like this

from setuptools import setup
setup(
    name='testing-cli',
    version='0.0.1',
    packages=['testing']
    entry_points = {
        'console_scripts': ['testing-cli = testing.cli:main'],
    }
)

Any ideas as to why when packaged I get an import error when it is packaged but when running like ./cli.py <arg> it imports fine?

Answer 1

The script will import modules from its directory , not from your current directory. That means that if you run /some/directory/cli.py module , it will look for module in /some/directory/module.py .

I presume that you're running cli.py from the directory with the other modules, but when it gets installed, testing-cli goes to some /usr/local/bin which doesn't contain the other modules. They are instead stored in a testing package on sys.path . So you actually need to do this:

importlib.import_module("testing." + args['<command>'])

or possibly through a relative import:

importlib.import_module("." + args['<command>'], package="testing")

This will mean that your script will stop working when you run it from the build directory, unless you installed the package. To fix that, use python setup.py develop , which will mock-install the package onto sys.path . (Or more straightforward, export PYTHONPATH=. That will put your current directory on sys.path and make the testing subdir visible as a package)