There are two quick ways to hack together custom imports in Python. One is by using the PYTHONPATH environmental variable, and the other way is by using the sys module in Python.

Method 1: PYTHONPATH

Before you call python set the environmental variable.

PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/other/path

Then you can call python.

Method 2: sys

In the beginning of your Python script add the following code.

import sys
sys.path.append('/other/path')

Remarks

Of course this isn’t the best way to add custom libraries to your Python scripts. Ideally, we would use pip to manage our dependencies. Perhaps a future blog post will cover this!