trying to make paths work - attempted relative import beyond top-level package

Question

I can't make this work..

My structure is:

program_name/

  __init__.py
  setup.py

  src/
    __init__.py

    Process/
        __init__.py
        thefile.py

  tests/
     __init__.py
     thetest.py

thetest.py:

from ..src.Process.thefile.py import sth

Running: pytest ./tests/thetest.py from program_name gives :

ValueError: attempted relative import beyond top-level package

I tried also other approaches but i am receiving various errors.

But I would expect for the above to work.

Answer 1

Just solved a similar problem with a lot of googling. Here's two solutions without changing the existing file structor:

1

The way to import module from parent folder from ..src.Process.thefile.py import sth is called "relative import".

It's only supported when launching as a package from the top-level package. In your case, that is launching command line from the directory which contains program_name/ and type (for win environment)

python -m program_name.tests.thetest

or simply (useful for many pytest files):

python -m pytest

2

Otherwise -- when trying to run a script alone or from a non top-level package -- you could manually add directory to the PYTHONPATH at run time.

import sys
from os import path
sys.path.append(path.dirname(path.dirname(path.abspath(__file__))))
from src.Process.thefile import s

Try the first one first see if it's compatiable with the pytest framework. Otherwise the second one should always solve the problem.

Reference (How to fix "Attempted relative import in non-package" even with __init__.py)

Answer 2

When importing a file, Python only searches the current directory, the directory that the entry-point script is running from. you can use sys.path to include different locations

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/application/app/folder')

import thefile