This always confuses me. When can I use relative imports (from ..module.misc import foo)? When do I have do use python -m foo? I do not like doing that.

These two SO answers are very helpful:

  1. Answer 1
  2. Answer 2

The crux is that relative imports are not allowed in the main module (code that you run from the command line without the -m switch, which I call “scripts”). I prefer running scripts from the root of the project directory, like python scripts/script1.py.

There are two possible solutions.

  1. Organize all your importable content in subdirectories under your scripts directory. 
    scripts/
scripts/script1.py
scripts/script2.py
scripts/module1/__init__.py
scripts/module1/foo.py
...
scripts/moduleN/__init__.py
scripts/moduleN/bar.py

    Then in scripts/script1.py you can do from module1 import foo, and run python scripts/script1.py.

  2. If you need to have sibling directories like 
    base/
base/scripts/script1.py
base/scripts/script2.py
base/module1/__init__.py
base/module1/foo.py
...
base/moduleN/__init__.py
base/moduleN/bar.py

    then you need an init_paths.py in scripts, containing import sys; sys.path.append('.'). Note the ., not ... This is because I intend to run scripts from base like python scripts/script1.py. So scripts is already in Python’s sys.path, and the append() statement puts base in there too. Then, add import init_paths.py at the start of every script in scripts. After that, you can import like from module1 import foo.

  3. Run with python -m. I do not consider this as an option because I dislike it.

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