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unable to load sublime text 3 package [duplicate]

I'm trying to write a plugin for Sublime Text 3.
I have to use several third party packages in my code. I have managed to get the code working by manually copying the packages into /home/user/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/, then I used relative imports to get to the needed code. How would I distribute the plugin to the end users? Telling them to copy the needed dependencies to the appropriate location is certainly not the way to go. How are 3rd party modules supposed to be used properly with Sublime Text plugins? I can't find any documentation online; all I see is the recommendation to put the modules in the folder.

Sublime uses it's own embedded Python interpreter (currently Python 3.3.6 although the next version will also support Python 3.8 as well) and as such it will completely ignore any version of Python that you may or may not have installed on your system, as well as any libraries that are installed for that version.
For that reason, if you want to use external modules (hereafter dependencies) you need to do extra work. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, each with their own set of pros and cons.
The following lists the various ways that you can achieve this; all of them require a bit of an understanding about how modules work in Python in order to understand what's going on. By and large except for the paths involved there's nothing too "Sublime Text" about the mechanisms at play.
NOTE: The below is accurate as of the time of this answer. However there are plans for Package Control to change how it works with dependencies that are forthcoming that may change some aspect of this.
This is related to the upcoming version of Sublime supporting multiple versions of Python (and the manner in which it supports them) which the current Package Control mechanism does not support.
It's unclear at the moment if the change will bring a new way to specify dependencies or if only the inner workings of how the dependencies are installed will change. The existing mechanism may remain in place regardless just for backwards compatibility, however.
All roads to accessing a Python dependency from a Sublime plugin involve putting the code for it in a place where the Python interpreter is going to look for it. This is similar to how standard Python would do things, except that locations that are checked are contained within the area that Sublime uses to store your configuration (referred to as the Data directory) and instead of a standalone Python interpreter, Python is running in the plugin host.
Populate the library into the Lib folder
Since version 3.0 (build 3143), Sublime will create a folder named Lib in the data directory and inside of it a directory based on the name of the Python version. If you use Preferences > Browse Packages and go up one folder level, you'll see Lib, and inside of it a folder named e.g. python3.3 (or if you're using a newer build, python33 and python38).
Those directories are directly on the Python sys.path by default, so anything placed inside of them will be immediately available to any plugin just as a normal Python library (or any of those built in) would be. You could consider these folders to be something akin to the site-packages folder in standard Python.
So, any method by which you could install a standard Python library can be used so long as the result is files ending up in this folder. You could for example install a library via pip and then manually copy the files to that location from site-packages, manually install from sources, etc.
Lib/python3.3/
|-- librarya
| `-- file1.py
|-- libraryb
| `-- file2.py
`-- singlefile.py
Version restrictions apply here; the dependency that you want to use must support the version of Python that Sublime is using, or it won't work. This is particularly important for Python libraries with a native component (e.g. a .dll, .so or .dylib), which may require hand compiling the code.
This method is not automatic; you would need to do it to use your package locally, and anyone that wants to use your package would also need to do it as well. Since Sublime is currently using an older version of Python, it can be problematic to obtain a correct version of libraries as well.
In the future, Package Control will install dependencies in this location (Will added the folder specifically for this purpose during the run up to version 3.0), but as of the time I'm writing this answer that is not currently the case.
Vendor your dependencies directly inside of your own package
The Packages folder is on the sys.path by default as well; this is how Sublime finds and loads packages. This is true of both the physical Packages folder, as well as the "virtual" packages folder that contains the contents of sublime-package files.
For example, one can access the class that provides the exec command via:
from Default.exec import ExecCommand
This will work even though the exec.py file is actually stored in Default.sublime-package in the Sublime text install folder and not physically present in the Packages folder.
As a result of this, you can vendor any dependencies that you require directly inside of your own package. Here this could be the User package or any other package that you're creating.
It's important to note that Sublime will treat any Python file in the top level of a package as a plugin and try to load it as one. Hence it's important that if you go this route you create a sub-folder in your package and put the library in there.
MyPackage/
|-- alibrary
| `-- code.py
`-- my_plugin.py
With this structure, you can access the module directly:
import MyPackage.alibrary
from MyPackage.alibrary import someSymbol
Not all Python modules lend themselves to this method directly without modification; some code changes in the dependency may be required in order to allow different parts of the library to see other parts of itself, for example if it doesn't use relative import to get at sibling files. License restrictions may also get in the way of this as well, depending on the library that you're using.
On the other hand, this directly locks the version of the library that you're using to exactly the version that you tested with, which ensures that you won't be in for any undue surprises further on down the line.
Using this method, anything you do to distribute your package will automatically also distribute the vendored library that's contained inside. So if you're distributing by Package Control, you don't need to do anything special and it will Just Work™.
Modify the sys.path to point to a custom location
The Python that's embedded into Sublime is still standard Python, so if desired you can manually manipulate the sys.path that describes what folders to look for packages in so that it will look in a place of your choosing in addition to the standard locations that Sublime sets up automatically.
This is generally not a good idea since if done incorrectly things can go pear shaped quickly. It also still requires you to manually install libraries somewhere yourself first, and in that case you're better off using the Lib folder as outlined above, which is already on the sys.path.
I would consider this method an advanced solution and one you might use for testing purposes during development but otherwise not something that would be user facing. If you plan to distribute your package via Package Control, the review of your package would likely kick back a manipulation of the sys.path with a request to use another method.
Use Package Control's Dependency system (and the dependency exists)
Package control contains a dependency mechanism that uses a combination of the two prior methods to provide a way to install a dependency automatically. There is a list of available dependencies as well, though the list may not be complete.
If the dependency that you're interested in using is already available, you're good to go. There are two different ways to go about declaring that you need one or more dependencies on your package.
NOTE: Package Control doesn't currently support dependencies of dependencies; if a dependency requires that another library also be installed, you need to explicitly mention them both yourself.
The first involves adding a dependencies key to the entry for your package in the package control channel file. This is a step that you'd take at the point where you're adding your package to Package Control, which is something that's outside the scope of this answer.
While you're developing your package (or if you decide that you don't want to distribute your package via Package Control when you're done), then you can instead add a dependencies.json file into the root of your package (an example dependencies.json file is available to illustrate this).
Once you do that, you can choose Package Control: Satisfy Dependencies from the command Palette to have Package Control download and install the dependency for you (if needed).
This step is automatic if your package is being distributed and installed by Package Control; otherwise you need to tell your users to take this step once they install the package.
Use Package Control's Dependency system (but the dependency does not exist)
The method that Package Control uses to install dependencies is, as outlined at the top of the question subject to change at some point in the (possibly near) future. This may affect the instructions here. The overall mechanism may remain the same as far as setup is concerned, with only the locations of the installation changing, but that remains to be seen currently.
Package Control installs dependencies via a special combination of vendoring and also manipulation of the sys.path to allow things to be found. In order to do so, it requires that you lay out your dependency in a particular way and provide some extra metadata as well.
The layout for the package that contains the dependency when you're building it would have a structure similar to the following:
Packages/my_dependency/
├── .sublime-dependency
└── prefix
└── my_dependency
└── file.py
Package Control installs a dependency as a Package, and since Sublime treats every Python file in the root of a package as a plugin, the code for the dependency is not kept in the top level of the package. As seen above, the actual content of the dependency is stored inside of the folder labeled as prefix above (more on that in a second).
When the dependency is installed, Package Control adds an entry to it's special 0_package_control_loader package that causes the prefix folder to be added to the sys.path, which makes everything inside of it available to import statements as normal. This is why there's an inherent duplication of the name of the library (my_dependency in this example).
Regarding the prefix folder, this is not actually named that and instead has a special name that determines what combination of Sublime Text version, platform and architecture the dependency is available on (important for libraries that contain binaries, for example).
The name of the prefix folder actually follows the form {st_version}_{os}_{arch}, {st_version}_{os}, {st_version} or all. {st_version} can be st2 or st3, {os} can be windows, linux or osx and {arch} can be x32 or x64.
Thus you could say that your dependency supports only st3, st3_linux, st3_windows_x64 or any combination thereof. For something with native code you may specify several different versions by having multiple folders, though commonly all is used when the dependency contains pure Python code that will work regardless of the Sublime version, OS or architecture.
In this example, if we assume that the prefix folder is named all because my_dependency is pure Python, then the result of installing this dependency would be that Packages/my_dependency/all would be added to the sys.path, meaning that if you import my_dependency you're getting the code from inside of that folder.
During development (or if you don't want to distribute your dependency via Package Control), you create a .sublime-dependency file in the root of the package as shown above. This should be a text file with a single line that contains a 2 digit number (e.g. 01 or 50). This controls in what order each installed dependency will get added to the sys.path. You'd typically pick a lower number if your dependency has no other dependencies and a higher value if it does (so that it gets injected after those).
Once you have the initial dependency laid out in the correct format in the Packages folder, you would use the command Package Control: Install Local Dependency from the Command Palette, and then select the name of your dependency.
This causes Package Control to "install" the dependency (i.e. update the 0_package_control_loader package) to make the dependency active. This step would normally be taken by Package Control automatically when it installs a dependency for the first time, so if you are also manually distributing your dependency you need to provide instructions to take this step.

Tell the module requirements in a particular directory (package)

In my office we have a quite complex directory structure when it comes to our code.
One of the things we have is a libs module to drop "common" things used by other parts of our big application (or set of applications... that are all living under a common directory).
The code in that libs/ directory requires certain packages installed in order for it to work. In said libs/ directory we have a requirements.txt file that supposedly lists the dependencies required for the things (things being Python code) in it to work. We have been filling that requirements.txt file pretty manually, tracking that "if this .py file uses this module, we should add it to the requirements file" so it's almost certain that by now we have forgotten adding some required modules.
Because of the complex structure we have (some parts use pipenv, some other have their own requirements.txt...) is very hard knowing whether a required module is going to end up installed or not.
So I would like to make sure that this libs/ directory (cough, cough... module ) has all its dependencies listed in its libs/requirements.txt.
Is that possible? Ideally it'd be "run this command passing /libs/ as an argument, it'll scan the directory and tell you what packages are needed by the py(s) found in it"
Thank you in advance.

Unfortunately, python does not know whether its dependencies are satisfied until runtime. requirements.txt is just a helper file for pip and similar tools, and you have to update it manually.
That said, you could
use the os module to recursively get a list of all *.py files in the folder
parse each one of them for lines having the format import aaa.bbb or from aaa import bbb
keep a set of the imports
However, even in that case, the name of the imported module is not the same as the name you need to pass to pip (eg, import yaml requires pyyaml in requirements.txt), but at least it could be a hint of what's missing.

use and install python personal libraries

I have two python projects, one includes useful packages for file manipulation and such. They are usefull because they can be reused in any other kind of project. The second is one of these projects, requiring the use of my useful packages. Here is my projects' file structure:
Python-projects/
Useful/
package_parsing/
package_file_manipulation/
package_blabla/
Super-Application/
pkg1/
__init__.py
module1.py
module2.py
pkg2/
setup.py
MANIFEST.in
README.rst
First of, I would like to use the Useful/package_parsing package in my module Super-Application/pkg1/module1.py. Is there a more convenient way to do it other than copying the package_parsing in Super-Application project?
Depending in the first answer, that is if there is a way to link a module from a different project, how could I include such external module in a release package of my Super-Application project? I am not sure that making use of install_requires in the setup.py will do.
My main idea here is not to duplicate the Useful/package_parsing package in all of my other development projects, especially when I would like to do modifications to this useful package. I wouldn't like to update all the outdated copies in each project.
=============
EDIT 1
It appears the first part of my question cna be dealt with appending the path:
import sys
sys.path.insert(0, path/to/Useful/package_parsing)
Moreover I can simply check the available paths using:
for p in sys.path:
print p
Now for the second part, how could I include such external module in a release package, possibly using the setup.py installation file?

Python 3.2: How to setup versioning for a project

Ok, so I have been looking around and I have seen a couple different options although i am new to python so i am a bit confused. Here is what I am looking for:
I have a project of multiple .py files. I have my files and a lib directory for the libraries i have created. My question is, how do i setup the project to have a version? I see a lot of articles saying that I put the version in setup.py. Where does setup.py go? what else needs to be in that setup.py file? Do I just import setup.py into my python files? How can i check to see if it worked? How can i check the version of each .py file to make sure it imported correctly?

Read hitchhiker's guide to packaging to learn good practice for developing a Python project
The setup.py file is at the heart of a Python project. It describes all of the metadata about your project. There a quite a few fields you can add to a project to give it a rich set of metadata describing the project. However, there are only three required fields: name, version, and packages. The name field must be unique if you wish to publish your package on the Python Package Index (PyPI). The version field keeps track of different releases of the project. The packages field describes where you’ve put the Python source code within your project.
Our initial setup.py will also include information about the license and will re-use the README.txt file for the long_description field. This will look like:
from distutils.core import setup
setup(
name='TowelStuff',
version='0.1dev',
packages=['towelstuff',],
license='Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license',
long_description=open('README.txt').read(),
)

Typically a project will include it's version as an __version__ attribute within its top level namespace.
For example:
>>> import myproject
>>> print myproject.__version__
'3.2.0'
See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0396/ for more info and ways to access __version__ from within your setup.py file.

How to package example scripts using distribute?

I use distribute to package a small python library. I made a directory structure as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to Packaging.
My question: Where (in the directory structure) do I place example scripts that show how to use the library and what changes are necessary to the setup.py?

I think its good, not to install the examples,
rather you can keep your examples folder with your distribution, so it may be on the same level where your setup.py,
If you want to include them, then include as separate module of package, like 'example' - and that directory holds the all example scripts, that users can refer even after installing.
package_data = {
'module_1': [files],
'module_2': [files],
'example': [files],
}

Example scripts are a type of documentation, so install them in the same way you would install other documentation: as package_data.