Why is my Python App Engine app using the Translate API getting an error of ImportError: No module named apiclient.discovery?

Question

You should be able to get these dependencies with this simple install:

sudo pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client

This is described on the quick start page for python.

apiclient was the original name of the library.
At some point, it was switched over to be googleapiclient.

If your code is running on Google App Engine, both should work.

If you are running the application yourself, with the google-api-python-client installed, both should work as well.

Although, if we take a look at the source code of the apiclient package's __init__.py module, we can see that the apiclient module was simply kept around for backwards-compatibility.

Retain apiclient as an alias for googleapiclient.

So, you really should be using googleapiclient in your code, since the apiclient alias was just maintained as to not break legacy code.

# bad
from apiclient.discovery import build

# good
from googleapiclient.discovery import build

apiclient is not in the list of third party library supplied by the appengine runtime: http://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/libraries27 .

You need to copy apiclient into your project directory & you need to copy these uritemplate & httplib2 too.

Note: Any third party library that are not supplied in the documentation list must copy to your appengine project directory

If none of the above solutions work for you, consider if you might have installed python through Anaconda. If this is the case then installing the google API library with conda might fix it.

Run:

python --version

If you get something like

Python 3.6.4 :: Anaconda, Inc.

Then try:

conda install google-api-python-client

As bgoodr has pointed out in a comment you might need to specify the channel (think repository) to get the google API library. At the time of writing this means running the command:

conda install -c conda-forge google-api-python-client

See more at https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/google-api-python-client

Make sure you only have google-api-python-client installed. If you have apiclient installed, it will cause a collision. So, run the following:

sudo pip uninstall apiclient

For app engine project you gotta install the lib locally by typing

pip install -t lib google-api-python-client

read more here

There is a download for the Google API Python Client library that contains the library and all of its dependencies, named something like google-api-python-client-gae-<version>.zip in the downloads section of the project. Just unzip this into your App Engine project.