apex ImportError on Google Colab

[mhiro216]

I try to install apex for pytorch on Google Colab.

I followed the install directions as follows, and the install seem to succeed.

!git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex; cd apex; pip3 install -v --no-cache-dir --global-option="--cpp_ext" --global-option="--cuda_ext" . --user

apex seem to be installed at:

!cd '/root/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages'; ls
...
amp_C.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
 apex
 apex-0.1-py3.6.egg-info
 apex_C.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
'~-ex'
'~-ex-0.1-py3.6.egg-info'
 fused_layer_norm_cuda.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
'~pex'
'~pex-0.1.dist-info'
'~pex-0.1-py3.6.egg-info'
 syncbn.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so

but when I check sys.modules['apex'], this shows just namespace, not like other modules:

sys.modules['apex']
...
<module 'apex' (namespace)>

other modules show like this:

sys.modules['pandas']
...
<module 'pandas' from '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/pandas/__init__.py'>

sys.path shows paths as follows:

sys.path
...
['/usr/lib/python36.zip',
 '/root/.ipython',
 '/root/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/',
 '/env/python',
 '/usr/lib/python3.6/lib-dynload',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/gitdb/ext/smmap',
 '/content/gdrive/My Drive/Colab Notebooks/kaggle-severstal-master/',
 '/usr/lib/python3.6',
 '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/git/ext/gitdb',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/IPython/extensions']

Could someone help me out to set the right position to read apex?

[mcarilli]

What directory are you attempting import from? Python automatically includes the current directory as a place it searches for packages, so if you are importing apex while you are directly in the apex directory (or even one level above I think) it may try to import directly from the repo folders instead of the install path. Make sure you are importing from a directory that is either several levels up or does not contain apex as a subdirectory. This gotcha can occur with any cloned repo containing Python code (including Pytorch itself, which happens to me occasionally).

See also #259 (comment)

[mhiro216]

Thank you for your reply.
After restarting Colab Notebook and deleting cloned repo, I succeeded to import apex.
It still fails if I just delete cloned repo. I don't know when it works or not...
Anyway, thank you for your advice.