Relative imports with unittest in Python

In my experience it is easiest if your project root is not a package, like so:

project/
  test.py
  run.py
  package/
    __init__.py
    main_program.py
    lib/
      __init__.py
      lib_a
      lib_b
    tests/
      __init__.py
      test_a
      test_b

However, as of python 3.2 , the unittest module provides the -t option, which lets you set the top level directory, so you could do (from package/):

python -m unittest discover -t ..

More details at the unittest docs.