Python sibling relative import error: 'no known parent package'

I want to import a module from a subpackage so I went here Relative importing modules from parent folder subfolder and since it was not working I read all the literature here on stack and found a smaller problem that I can reproduce but cannot solve.

I want to use relative imports because I don't wanna deal with sys.path etc and I don't wanna install every module of my project to be imported everywhere. I wanna make it work with relative imports.

My project structure:

project/
    __init__.py
    bar.py
    foo.py
    main.py

bar.py:

from .foo import Foo

class Bar():

    @staticmethod
    def get_foo():
        return Foo()

foo.py:

class Foo():
    pass

main.py:

from bar import Bar

def main():
    f = Bar.get_foo()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I am running the project code from terminal with python main.py and I get the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "**omitted** project/main.py", line 1, in <module>
    from bar import Bar
  File "**omitted** project/bar.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .foo import Foo
ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package

Why am I getting this error? It seems that bar doesn't recognize project as the parent package but:

• __init__.py is in place
• bar.py is being run as a module not a script since it is called from main and not from the command line (so __package__ and __name__ should be in place to help solve the relative import Relative imports for the billionth time)

Why am I getting this error? What am I getting wrong? I have worked for a while just adding the parent of cwd to the PYTHONPATH but I wanna fix this once and for all.

You should be running your project from the parent of project dir as:

$ python -m project.main # note no .py

This tells python that there is a package named project and inside it a module named main - then relative and absolute imports work correctly - once you change the import in main in either of

from .bar import Bar # relative
from project.bar import Bar # absolute