Proper relative imports: "Unable to import module"

Question

I have a project structured like this:

. └── myapp     ├── app.py     ├── models     │   ├── hello.py     │   └── world.py     └── requirements.txt 

I have two models, hello and world. Both models are used from app.py where I import them like this:

from models.hello import Hello from models.world import World 

But world also needs to use hello. I tried this in world.py:

from models.hello import Hello 

The above technically works when I run the app, but VSCode's Python extension gives me the following error:

E0401:Unable to import 'models.hello'. 

What is the proper way of importing a submodule from the same directory? How do I avoid this error in VSCode?

Answer 1

The error you are receiving is one that's reported by a python linter named pylint. So the problem isn't really specific to the vscode extension.

There are two solutions:

1. Please try adding an .env file in your project directory with the vape PYTHONPATH=./myapp, this will tell pylint where to find your modules

2. Or just open the folder myapp in vscode directly instead of opening the parent directory in vscode.

Answer 2

The error is coming from pylint. You need to add this line into settings.json file (VS Code):

"python.linting.pylintArgs": ["--init-hook",         "import sys; sys.path.append('<absolute path to myapp directory>')"],