Editing Pythonista Cookbook (section)

== Locating modules in parent directories ==
Given a project structure like this:

<pre>
|
+- my_module/
| |
| +- test/
| | |
| | +- test_some_pkg.py
| | |
| | +- [etc...]
| |
| +- some_pkg.py
| |
| +- [etc...}
|
+- some_top_level_file.py
|
+- [etc...]
</pre>

In `my_module/test/test_some_pkg.py` `some_pkg` is imported with:

<syntaxhighlight lang="python">
from my_module import some_pkg
</syntaxhighlight>

If you have `my_module/test/test_pkg_a.py` open in Pythonista and try to run it, you'll get an error that it doesn't know anything about `my_module`.

(By contrast, in PyCharm, you can specify the base path of the project in the Run settings which will avoid this.)

In order to get around this in Pythonista, add the top-level path to `PYTHONPATH` by adding this before importing `some_pkg`:

<syntaxhighlight lang="python">
import sys; sys.path.append('../../')
</syntaxhighlight>

That line should be removed before committing any changes to git. It won't break anything, it's just unnecessary in any other context.