Python Nose Import Error

You've got an __init__.py in your top level directory. That makes it a package. If you remove it, your nosetests should work.

If you don't remove it, you'll have to change your import to import dir.foo, where dir is the name of your directory.

Are you in a virtualenv? In my case, nosetests was the one in /usr/bin/nosetests, which was using /usr/bin/python. The packages in the virtualenv definitely won't be in the system path. The following fixed this:

source myvirtualenv/activate
pip install nose
which nosetests
/home/me/myvirtualenv/bin/nosetests

To those of you finding this question later on: I get the import error if I don't have an __init__.py file in my tests directory.

My directory structure was like this:

./tests/
  ./test_some_random_stuff.py

If I ran nosetests:

nosetests -w tests

It would give the ImportError that everyone else is seeing. If I add a blank __init__.py file it works just fine:

./tests/
  ./__init__.py
  ./test_some_random_stuff.py