Python does not recognize a module which is set by PYTHONPATH

Question

I've searched for some time to find a solution to this problem but have come up dry. I'm hoping I can find some help here. As the title suggests, python is not recognizing a module that has been set in my PYTHONPATH.

I'm currently working on a project that has the following overall structure:

base
├── util
│   └── logging_utility.py
└── project
    └── app
        ├── config.py
        └── runner.py

This is executed in python 3.5 via a virtual environment called venv_1. I use a Mac running El Capitan.

My runner.py script calls the logging_utility using the following import statement:

from util.logging_utility import method.

When executing, I receive this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named 'util.logging_utility'

I am running this in the terminal from the base level of the directory. I'm using the following command to call the script:

PYTHONPATH=$HOME/base VIRTUAL_ENV=$HOME/.virtualenvs/venv_1 PATH=$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin:$PATH $HOME/.virtualenvs/venv_1/bin/python -- project/app/runner.py

Now, I've tried to debug this by printing out my env as well as sys.path. In both cases, the base directory appears in the path. So why on earth am I receiving this error?

I've also tried to update the import statement to from base.util.logging_utility import method which gives me the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named 'base'

Any idea why this is happening and how I can correct this?

Thanks!

UPDATE

Thanks to Billy and Moinuddin Quadri whose suggestions solved the issue. For some reason I still needed to add the __init__.py files. Even though python 3.3+ supports implicit imports, looks like it was still needed. This solved the problem.

Answer 1

You might not be having the path to package in your PYTHONPATH. In order to add that, do:

 import sys
 sys.path.append('/absolute/path/to/base')

---

Since from Python 3.3, you do not need the __init__.py.

For the older version, the other possible reason is missing __init__.py. If you do not have a __init__.py file present in the directory, you can not import files of that directory.

As is mentioned in the Packages Document:

The __init__.py files are required to make Python treat the directories as containing packages; this is done to prevent directories with a common name, such as string, from unintentionally hiding valid modules that occur later on the module search path. In the simplest case, __init__.py can just be an empty file, but it can also execute initialization code for the package or set the __all__ variable, described later.