Sibling Package Import in Python

Sibling Package Import in Python

.
├── a.py
├── b.py
└── __pycache__
    └── a.cpython-311.pyc

1 directory, 3 files

When our directory structure is like this, there is no problem importing something from a to b or vice versa. We can do like from a import hello and it works fine.

But what if the structure is like this ..

.
├── dirA
│   └── a.py
├── dirB
│   └── b.py
└── __pycache__
    └── a.cpython-311.pyc
  • 1st try :
from dirB.a import hello
hello()
  • and it gives error
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dirB'

2nd try :

from ..dirA import a
a.hello()
  • And it gives different type of error ( but seems better than the previous one )
    from ..dirA import a
ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package

Solution

  • create a virtual environment in the project folder.
  • create a setup.py file with the following content ..
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
setup(name='myproject', version='1.0', packages=find_packages())
  • Do pip install -e .
  • Now this works fine.
from dirA import a
a.hello()

.
├── dirA
│   ├── a.py
│   ├── __pycache__
│   │   └── a.cpython-311.pyc
│   └── subdirA
│       ├── a.py
│       └── __pycache__
│           └── a.cpython-311.pyc
├── dirB
│   └── b.py
├── myproject.egg-info
│   ├── dependency_links.txt
│   ├── PKG-INFO
│   ├── SOURCES.txt
│   └── top_level.txt
├── __pycache__
│   └── a.cpython-311.pyc
├── setup.py
  • The directory structure is like this and now we can import dirA/subdirA/a also. ex:
# dirB/b.py
from dirA.subdirA import a
a.hello2()
# output : Hello world

Reference : stackoverflow