I've been having troubles with this and cannot find the solution... I've browsed all SO questions about this but nothing worked in my case... So here's the problem:

1. I clone a project from git repository
2. Set up a virtualenv called env in project base dir with proper Python version(2.7) & install all reqs succesfully
3. Here's where it gets fun... I navigate to the folder that has my manage.py and do a python manage.py makemigrations which results in

from foo.bar.data import CoolioClass

ImportError: No module named foo.bar.data

My directories look like this (just for illustration):

project_root/
     ├──env/
     ├──django/
     │      ├── app
     │      │   └── models.py (from foo.bar.data import CoolioClass)
     │      ├── django
     │      │   └── settings.py
     │      └── manage.py
     └──foo/
        ├── bar
        │   ├── __init__.py
        │   ├── data.py
        │   └── test.py
        ├── baz
        │   ├── __init__.py
        │   ├── data.py
        │   └── test.py
        └── __init__.py

When I print sys.path in python shell it results in:

/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7
/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu
/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7/lib-tk
/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7/lib-old
/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload
/usr/lib/python2.7
/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk
/home/johnny/project_root/env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
/home/johnny/project_root/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages