To comply with the pep8, you should include your project path to the python path in order to perform relative / absolute imports.

To do so, you can have a look at this answer: Permanently add a directory to PYTHONPATH

Often I have multiple files with tests in a subdirectory foo/tests of my project, while the modules I'm testing are in foo/src. To run the tests from foo/tests without import errors I create a file foo/tests/pathmagic.py that looks like this;

"""Path hack to make tests work."""


import os
import sys


bp = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath('.')).split(os.sep)
modpath = os.sep.join(bp + ['src'])
sys.path.insert(0, modpath)

In every test file, I then use

import pathmagic  # noqa

as the first import. The "noqa" comment prevents pycodestyle/pep8 from complaining about an unused import.

There is another workaround.

import sys
... all your other imports...


sys.path.insert("..", 0)
try:
import my_module
except:
raise

If there are just a few imports, you can just ignore PEP8 on those import lines:

import sys
sys.path.insert("..", 0)
import my_module  # noqa: E402

I've just struggled with a similar question, and I think I found a slightly nicer solution than the accepted answer.

Create a pathmagic module that does the actual sys.path manipulation, but make the change within a context manager:

"""Path hack to make tests work."""


import os
import sys


class context:
def __enter__(self):
bp = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath('.')).split(os.sep)
modpath = os.sep.join(bp + ['src'])
sys.path.insert(0, modpath)


def __exit__(self, *args):
pass

Then, in your test files (or wherever you need this), you do:

import pathmagic


with pathmagic.context():
import my_module
# ...

This way you don't get any complaints from flake8/pycodestyle, you don't need special comments, and the structure seems to make sense.

For extra neatness, consider actually reverting the path in the __exit__ block, though this may cause problems with lazy imports (if you put the module code outside of the context), so maybe not worth the trouble.

EDIT: Just saw a much simpler trick in an answer to a different question: add assert pathmagic under your imports to avoid the noqa comment.

Did you already try the following:

import sys
from importlib import import_module


sys.path.insert("..", 0)


# import module
my_mod = import_module('my_module')


# get method or function from my_mod
my_method = getattr(my_mod , 'my_method')

This problem already has several solutions that work, but in the case that you have a number of non-initial imports, and don't want to annotate each with # noqa: E402 (or use one of the other proposals), the following works for a whole block:

import sys
sys.path.insert("..", 0)


if True:  # noqa: E402
import my_module_1
import my_module_2
...

Given that the path to be added is relative to the script, this can be solved by using relative path.

from ..mypath import mymodule
from ..mypath.mysubfolder import anothermodule

Then do not need to use sys.path.insert() anymore. Lint stoped complaining.