Python import fails on travisCI but not locally

Question

I'm trying to integrate TravisCI into my workflow, and realized I had some dependencies because of my old directory structure (not having self-contained, virtualenv-able git repos).

When I try to run nosetests locally, it runs the tests just fine; when TravisCI tries to run them, it fails, with an import error. Specifically, I have, as one of the lines in my test script:

from myproject import something

My directory structure is inside my git repo myproject is something like:

.travis.yml
requirements.txt
something.py
tests/
    test_something.py

• I have tried getting this to fail locally (because then I'd understand the TravisCI issue, maybe), but cannot accomplish it.
• I've tried running with regular python, and using a virtualenv which added nose to its requirements.txt, and the tests always pass locally.

I feel like I still haven't understood absolute-vs-relative imports, and I can't tell if that's coming in to play here, or if I'm just doing something obvious and dumb in my project.

Desired outcome: figure out why TravisCI is failing, and fix my repo accordingly, so that I can commit and have things build correctly, both locally and on TravisCI. If that requires more drastic changes like "you should have a setup.py that does blah-blah to the environment" or similar - please let me know. I'm new to this aspect of Python, and find the current documentation overwhelmingly unclear.

As an FYI, I found this question and adding --exe doesn't help, or seem to be the same issue.

Answer 1

I see there are no answer and I encountered the same issue, so I am posting here in hope to help somebody:

Solution 1

The quick fix for me was to add this line export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd) in the .travis.yml:

before_install:
  - "pip install -U pip"
  - "export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd)"

Solution 2

Having a setup.py which should be the default option as it is the most elegant, configured like:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

setup(name='MyPythonProject',
      version='0.0.1',
      description='What it does',
      author='',
      author_email='',
      url='',
      packages=find_packages(),
     )

And then add this line in .travis.yml

before_install:
  - "pip install -U pip"
  - "python setup.py install"

Solution 3:

Changing the layout of the project to have the test folder under the application one (the one with your core python code) such as:

.travis.yml
requirements.txt
app
|_ tests
|   |_ test_application.py
|_ application.py

And running the test in travis with coverage and nosetest like:

script:
    - "nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package app"