Django ImportError

Question

I created my own Django application with directory structure

/appname
    __init__.py
    models.py
    /submodule1
        __init__.py
        a.py

Inside a.py I have the following import

from ..models import Something

This works okay if I have /appname inside my /djangoproject folder, but when I install the app to Python's site-packages (via setup.py which I created), all hell breaks loose and a.py can no longer import Something, with the following error:

ImportError: cannot import name Something

Here is the setup.py:

from distutils.core import setup

setup(name='appname',
      version='0.1',
      packages=['appname', 'appname.contrib'],
)

Solution 1

It turns out that it was a circular import error. models.py was importing a.py and a.py was importing models.py.

Breaking this circle solved the import issues, but now it is time to figure out how to do lazy evaluation in Python :-)

Solution 2

Put empty file named: __init__.py inside /submodule1 so Python can parse it as module. It should help. The same in /appname - there should be also __init__.py file

Comments

[Andrew Lee]

Yes I had __init__.py in both /submodule1 and / but it is still giving me the ImportError.

[Harry]

I've run into this myself, I just put the import statement inside the function that required a.py but that seems icky. What was your solution?