"Module not found" when dependency missing in multi-package build

[philvarner]

I'm not sure if anything needs to be fixed for this issue. A better error message would be nice, and maybe it could be added to the troubleshooting section in the docs. It took me 2 hours to figure out the problem, so I thought I'd at least put this in here in case anyone else runs into the same issue.

The project is https://github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi. It has 4 packages in subdirectories, each with it's own setup.py.

The error I was getting after adding a new module file (foobar.py) was:

Module not found: stac_fastapi.types.foobar
ERROR: 1
make: *** [docs] Error 1

This was confusing because the module was there.

The problem turned out to be that I'd inadvertently added a import to this module that was not a dependency of this package's setup.py, but was a dependency of one of the other package's setup.py. This code worked fine when the tests were run because all 4 packages are installed, so the dependency was fulfilled. When pdoc was run, I guess the module didn't load correctly and therefore couldn't be found.