Best practice for configuring local python package imports for github repo?

Question

I'm newish to imports so it's possible my approach is patchy but i'm really struggling to piece together how this is supposed to be done.

So I have a github repo I am working on that currently looks something like this:

Github-repo-name
   /src
      /repo-name
         __init__.py
         /packages
            __init__.py
            mypackage1/
               __init__.py
               p1_module1.py
            mypackage2/
               __init__.py
               p2_module1.py
         main.py
      /scripts
         do_something.py
      /datasets

I'm trying to import mypackage1 into do_something.py in order to generate some data to put in datasets/ but was having lots of trouble when I ran the do_something.py script in the src directory.

I had this line in do_something.py:

import repo-name.packages.mypackage1

and was hitting: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named repo-name

I tried relative imports to no more success

from ..repo-name.packages import mypackage1

ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package

I couldn't make head or tail of this issue so I instead tried adding my packages to the path in do_something.py

file_path = pathlib.Path(__file__)
path = file_path.resolve().parents[2]
sys.path.append(str(path))

import repo-name.packages.mypackage1

Success!

Except now i'm wondering if this really what I should be doing and if this isn't a bit hacky. The idea of needing to add the path at runtime seems a bit messy so i'd rather have it all the time. I've read I can use PYTHONPATH for this purpose which would be great if it were just me using this repo, but I intend for this to be shared and reproduceable. I thought about maybe writing a shell script to set the PYTHONPATH but i'm not sure that's much better.

So my question is what is the right/better/a good way of doing what i'm trying to do?

Answer 1

Oliver.
I don't know what is the best way, but I'm trying to show you how our team works.

When developing,
i) register PYTHONPATH in ~/.bashrc
ii) sys.path.append(path/to/root/repo) on the top of the code

Our team usually does it as an initial way.

To distinguish whether they receive the authority of repo or not, you can check the below.

# Suppose you created a setup.py(to make `.whl` file) on `repo-name`.
if __name__ == '__main__':
    from repo-name.packages.mypackage1 import *
else:
    from ..repo-name.packages.mypackage1 import *