python - Relative imports - ModuleNotFoundError: No module named x

Question

This is the first time I've really sat down and tried python 3, and seem to be failing miserably. I have the following two files:

1. test.py
2. config.py

config.py has a few functions defined in it as well as a few variables. I've stripped it down to the following:

config.py

debug = True

test.py

import config
print (config.debug)

I also have an __init__.py

However, I'm getting the following error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'config'

I'm aware that the py3 convention is to use absolute imports:

from . import config

However, this leads to the following error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'config'

So I'm at a loss as to what to do here... Any help is greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

TL;DR: You can't do relative imports from the file you execute since __main__ module is not a part of a package.

Absolute imports - import something available on sys.path

Relative imports - import something relative to the current module, must be a part of a package

If you're running both variants in exactly the same way, one of them should work. Here is an example that should help you understand what's going on. Let's add another main.py file with the overall directory structure like this:

.
./main.py
./ryan/__init__.py
./ryan/config.py
./ryan/test.py

And let's update test.py to see what's going on:

# config.py
debug = True

# test.py
print(__name__)

try:
    # Trying to find module in the parent package
    from . import config
    print(config.debug)
    del config
except ImportError:
    print('Relative import failed')

try:
    # Trying to find module on sys.path
    import config
    print(config.debug)
except ModuleNotFoundError:
    print('Absolute import failed')

# main.py
import ryan.test

Let's run test.py first:

$ python ryan/test.py
__main__
Relative import failed
True

Here "test" is the __main__ module and doesn't know anything about belonging to a package. However import config should work, since the ryan folder will be added to sys.path.

Let's run main.py instead:

$ python main.py
ryan.test
True
Absolute import failed

And here test is inside of the "ryan" package and can perform relative imports. import config fails since implicit relative imports are not allowed in Python 3.

Hope this helped.

P.S.: If you're sticking with Python 3 there is no more need for __init__.py files.