How to check if a python module exists without importing it?

To check if you can import something in Python 2, you can use imp module with try...except. For example,

import imp
try:
    imp.find_module('eggs')
    found = True
except ImportError:
    found = False
print found

This will give you the output:

False

You can also use iter_modules from the pkgutil module to iterate over all modules to find if specified module exists. For example,

from pkgutil import iter_modules
def module_exists(module_name):
    return module_name in (name for loader, name, ispkg in iter_modules())
print module_exists('scrapy')

This will give the output:

True

This is because this module is installed on my PC.

Or if you just want to check it in the shell, you could use,

python -c "help('modules');" | grep yourmodule