Replace relative imports from tutorial with absolute imports to avoid crashes

[gustavonmartins]

I had been following the official FastAPI tutorials and I have had many bugs. After some time understanding them and trying to fix, I saw they were due to the usage of relative imports.

Two person in my team had this problem independently and took some hours and tweaks to make a hack to this issue. In stackoverflow i also found many people having headches due to relative imports.

Only later I have found that PEP8 warns about pitfalls of relative imports and strongly advice for usage of absolute imports. After trying this, my code of the FastAPI tutorial worked.

Could you please use absolute imports in your tutorial to avoid this recurrent problem?
Thanks!

Source of recomendation of absolute imports over relative:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

[Kludex]

Which tutorials?

[gustavonmartins]

The ones in fastapi.tiangolo.com.

From those examples, people in team stared to make more adventurous relative imports and having crashes.

For example:
https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/sql-databases/


https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/testing/:

[raphaelauv]

Good , you can open a PR :)

[wesselhuising]

How did you fix this? I want to dockerize the thing from the tutorial but don't want to go creating a whole package to fix the issue with imports.

[Mause]

I'm not sure I understand why creating a package is difficult here, or even required? You can update the code you copy from examples to not use relative imports

[owlas]

I'm actually quite curious what the best practice is.

It seems very common that projects don't install as a package but use relative imports.

In the full stack example the PYTHONENV variable is set to give fully qualified imports without installing: https://github.com/tiangolo/full-stack-fastapi-postgresql/blob/master/%7B%7Bcookiecutter.project_slug%7D%7D/backend/backend.dockerfile

Is there any reason not to install app as a package? It would be useful in my case because I want to grab the metadata info from the package (e.g. version)

[lf2foce]

I got this problem too. Whole app run properly but when it comes to running the package alone, there will be a problem.

[TorrezMN]

I had the same problems described in this thread...
following the SQLDATABASES tutorial
mentioned above and the same thing happened...

fixing and tweaking a bit I got it to work without making much change to the file structure...
I already sent a PR... #4510

I tried the tutorial application in normal mode with VIRTUALENV and with DOCKER and it runs perfectly...

i'm new to 'contributions' so if someone could give some kind of feedback would be great...
I did my best to explain what are the problems that I have when I follow the tutorial as it is... and add some photos too... I don't know if it's ok like this...

[tiangolo]

Absolute imports would also not solve it. That would mean that each of your Python files is an independent module, but they would still need to be able to find the other Python modules, so the same rules of Python imports would apply. It depends on the environment, the place from where you run your Python code, and if you have the proper directory and file structures with __init__.py files.

If you follow the tutorial from the beginning without skipping sections, you would see that the file structure is explained: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/sql-databases/#file-structure

And then you can see that it's used later taking into account that there's a top level directory (package) sql_app: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/sql-databases/#check-it

Sorry for the long delay! 🙈 I wanted to personally address each issue and they piled up through time, but now I'm checking each one in order.

[github-actions]

Assuming the original need was handled, this will be automatically closed now. But feel free to add more comments or create new issues or PRs.