How to include third party Python packages in Sublime Text 2 plugins

I'm writing a sublime text 2 plugin that uses a module SEAPI.py which in itself imports the requests module.

Since sublime text 2 uses it's own embedded python interpreter, it doesn't see the requests module installed in my ubuntu machine (I get the following error: ImportError: No module named requests).

Best solution I could find so far was to copy the 'requests' module (the whole directory of files) from /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests into my plugin directory in the sublime text packages dir. But after that, it says that it can't find the 'urllib3' module.

Is there a better way to import the requests module so that I won't have to copy all the files into my plugin directory ?

The current code I'm using is as follows:

MyPlugin.py

import sublime
import sublime_plugin
import SEAPI
...

SEAPI.py

import requests
try:
    import simplejson as json
except:
    import json
from time import time, sleep
...

Edit: The selected answer is correct and fixes my main question, but a different problem exists with using the current version of 'Requests' with the embedded sublime text 2 interpreter. ST2's python is missing various modules which exist in regular 2.7 python (such as 'fileio').

I've solved it with using the 'Requests' module from here: https://github.com/bgreenlee/sublime-github

And I had to edit the 'urllib3/response.py' file to this:

try:
    from cStringIO import StringIO as BytesIO
except ImportError:
    pass  # _fileio doesn't seem to exist in ST's python in Linux, but we don't need it

You need to bundle full requests distribution with your Python package and then modify Python's sys.path (where it looks for modules) to point to a folder containing requests folder.

Download Requests library from a PyPi and extract it manually under your plugin folder
Before importing requests in your plugin, append the corrcet folder to sys.path to point a folder where it can found requests import

The (untested) code should look like something like this:

  import sys 
  import os

  # request-dists is the folder in our plugin
  sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "requests-dist"))

  import requests

This also assumes that requests setup.py does not do any hacks when you install the module using easy_install or pip.

You also could import requests zip directly as Python supports importing from ZIP files, assuming requests is distributed in compatible way. Example (advanced):

https://github.com/miohtama/ztanesh/blob/master/zsh-scripts/python-lib/zipimporter.py

More about sys.path trick (2004)

http://www.johnny-lin.com/cdat_tips/tips_pylang/path.html

Mikko's answer is good, but I may have found a slightly easier way: