IPython autoreload changes in subdirectory

Question

I launch IPython from the main folder /project. Now if I make changes in the file /project/tests/some_module.py, the changes fail to be autoreloaded in IPython. Also, I get the following message after I save the changes and want to run some other script in the prompt:

[autoreload of some_module failed: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/IPython/extensions/autoreload.py", line 229, in check
    superreload(m, reload, self.old_objects)
ImportError: No module named some_module]

It seems it detects changes were made inside folder /tests but it cannot import it. Can someone help me with this?

Edit: For better clarification: I launch IPython from the terminal in the main folder. In this folder, I have another folder tests. Inside tests I have two python files:

some_module.py:

def hello_world():
  print "Hello World!!!"

use_some_module.py:

from some_module import hello_world

hello_world()

Once I launched IPython, further changes in some_module.py won't be loaded in IPython. For example, if I add a second print "Hello Earth!!!" in the definition of hello_world(), and run run tests/use_some_module.py, I get the error message shown above, and will only get the "Hello World!!!" print.

Edit2: I would like a solution where I don't need to either change the working directory, or adding any search paths manually. I want it to be loaded automatically with autoreload.

Answer 1

If all you need is to reload a changed file in Python just do the following:

from main import some_module
....
reload(some_module)

But if your reload purposes are really eager, you can do the following (taken from this question):

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

The previous code will reload all changed modules every time before executing a new line.

NOTE: You can also check dreload which does a recursive reload of a module, and %run which allows you to run any python script and load all of its data directly into the interactive namespace.

Hope it helps,