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I'm trying to run a scrapy project on a ubuntu server. For which I need to add the project path to python path.

I created a .bash_profile file in the /home directory with the following contents:

PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/john/Desktop/myscraper/
EXPORT $PYTHONPATH

But I'm getting error running my python file stating it didn't find the module.

ImportError: No module named myscraper.items

I tried using the following paths, but nothing works.

  • /home/john/Desktop/myscraper/
  • /home/john/Desktop/myscraper
  • home/john/Desktop/myscraper/
  • home/john/Desktop/myscraper
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    Did you really create it in the /home directory - or in your $HOME directory? Did you really write EXPORT - or export? – steeldriver Feb 1 '18 at 23:42
  • I wrote EXPORT all in caps, and created the file in the /home directory. I don't know what you mean by the $HOME directory. – Raven Feb 1 '18 at 23:46
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Config files belong in your personal home directory (/home/$USER, $HOME or simply ~), not in the /home directory. In your case that will be /home/john.

Please also make sure to use the correct casing, it's export in all lowercase.

Since export is not accessing but referencing the variable, you do not use the $ sign: export PYTHONPATH

Are you sure you want to have this in your .bash_profile and not your .bashrc? You can read up on the difference here.

In any case you will have to run source ~./bash_profile (or source ~./bashrc if you go with that) for your changes to take effect.

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  • Just saw the comments by @steeldriver on the question. Sorry for posting duplicate content, credit of first posting this goes to him :) – NeoTheThird Feb 1 '18 at 23:52
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    It's all good - you might want to point out that the OP will need to log out and back in (or at least start a new login shell or source the ~/.bash_profile) for the change to take effect – steeldriver Feb 1 '18 at 23:55
  • It says `bash: export: /home/john/Desktop/myscraper:/home/john/Desktop/myscraper not a valid identifier' – Raven Feb 2 '18 at 0:04
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    Loose the $ after the export command and you should be fine: export PYTHONPATH You might want to request for that to be changed in the documentation that you're copying these commands from. – NeoTheThird Feb 2 '18 at 0:09
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    Run echo $PYTHONPATH to confirm the path has been added correctly. The output should contain /home/john/Desktop/myscraper. Debugging the software you're installing goes beyond the scope of this thread. – NeoTheThird Feb 2 '18 at 0:22
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In addition to NeoTheThird's answer:

Ubuntu does not use ~/.bash_profile by default. You should use ~/.profile instead.

The path you should use is /home/john/Desktop/myscraper, though /home/john/Desktop/myscraper/ would also work. Paths that don't start with slashes are relative, not absolute, so will not work unless the working directory is /. More details here on Wikipedia.

You can put the definition and export statements together, and if PYTHONPATH is not already defined, you can leave off the $PYTHONPATH: at the start.

export PYTHONPATH=/home/john/Desktop/myscraper
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  • +1 The hint on the relative path is good, forgot that in my answer. – NeoTheThird Feb 2 '18 at 10:52

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