Running fabric script throws ImportError: No module named celery

Question

I've been tearing my hear out for quite some time now.

• I am in my virtualenv and I have celery==3.1.9 installed there.
• I have a default celery/django setup (http://celery.readthedocs.org/en/latest/django/first-steps-with-django.html) and it is working fine.

As soon as I run any fabric scripts it throws ImportError: No module named celery originating from my proj/proj/celery.py file. What is going on?

Full traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/fabric/main.py", line 658, in main
    docstring, callables, default = load_fabfile(fabfile)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/fabric/main.py", line 165, in load_fabfile
    imported = importer(os.path.splitext(fabfile)[0])
  File "/home/username/Projects/proj/fabfile/__init__.py", line 2, in <module>
    from .staging import *
  File "/home/username/Projects/proj/fabfile/staging.py", line 3, in <module>
    from proj.settings.staging import DOMAIN, IP, USER, PASSWORD
  File "/home/username/Projects/proj/proj/__init__.py", line 5, in <module>
    from .celery import app as celery_app
  File "/home/username/Projects/proj/proj/celery.py", line 3, in <module>
    from celery import Celery
ImportError: No module named celery

EDIT: I don't think the contents of my fabric scripts have anything to do with it. For the sake of example I set:

from fabric.api import local
def foo():
    local('echo bar')

Calling fab foo raises ImportError: No module named celery. Actually if I call just fab the result is the same.

My proj/proj/__init__.py:

from __future__ import absolute_import

# This will make sure the app is always imported when
# Django starts so that shared_task will use this app.
from .celery import app as celery_app

Just as in the celery tutorial

EDIT:

This works:

(venv)rg@dfi:~/Projects/proj$ python
Python 2.7.4 (default, Sep 26 2013, 03:20:26) 
[GCC 4.7.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from celery import Celery
>>> 

Answer 1

A workaround is to install a system-wide celery, but this is clearly not desired behavior of fabric.

Answer 2

I stumbled across the same problem. Since I wanted to send a task from fabric rather than registering tasks, I used the celery command line interface instead:

from fabric.api import local

def run_slow_tests():
    local("celery call 'myapp.tasks.run_slow_tests'")