10. PYTHONPATH variable

10.1. module search path and pythonpath

While trying to import a module, you may have encountered the following error:

>>>import mymodule
Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “<pyshell#2>”, line 1, in ?
        import mymodule
ImportError: No module named mymodule

This happens because while importing a module, the Python interpreter searches for it in certain predefined locations. These predefined locations are a set of directories that constitute the Python search path, which is defined by the current directory and the Python search path that is specified in the environment variable PYTHONPATH.