I’m currently working on a personal project in Python where I have many different packages to organize different pieces of similar code together. I’ve come into a situation where I need to access a piece of code from a different directory, but run into errors when I try running the code from the terminal. (Windows Command Prompt)

Here’s a simpler example of the problem I’m running into:

parentPackage/
   __init__.py
   pack1/
      __init__.py
      file1.py
   pack2/
      __init__.py
      file2.py
      file3.py

Files 1 and 2 contain functions called foo() and foo2(), respectively, and I need to access both functions inside of file 3.

Using PyCharm, I can run file 3 perfectly using the following imports:

from parentPackage.pack1.file1 import foo
from file2 import foo2

However, the command terminal gives me errors when doing this:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'parentPackage' (line 1)

Using relative imports, I can get something that the compiler accepts but that still fails at runtime:

from ..pack1.file1 import foo
from file2 import foo2 

ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package (line 1)

Any suggestions on how to access the functions I need from file 3?