## TL;DR

What was going on I was wiring Composio tools into a Phidata agent and wanted to use the Google Docs or Notion actions. A maintainer asked for pip show output and pointed out the installed package was the problem.

## Steps

1. What was going on
I was wiring Composio tools into a Phidata agent and wanted to use the Google Docs or Notion actions. The moment I ran anything composio related I got ImportError: cannot import name 'Action' from 'composio', and even the CLI itself crashed on startup. My Python was 3.12.7 and the traceback went through composio/cli/context.py. A maintainer asked for pip show output and pointed out the installed package was the problem.

2. What fixed it
The problem wasnt Composio itself, it was the PyPI package name. The bare composio package on PyPI was a stale shim by a different author that breaks the import, so anything you run against it blows up. Uninstall it and install the real one: pip uninstall composio -y, then pip install composio-core. The reporter confirmed it worked after switching to composio-core, and the maintainers closed it out.

## When to use

You are seeing this: The moment I ran anything composio related I got ImportError: cannot import name 'Action' from 'composio', and even the CLI itself crashed on startup. Use this skill when you run into "cannot import name 'Action' from 'composio' - ImportError when using Composio tools".

## When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

## Versions

Versions mentioned in the source: was 3.12.7. If you are on something much newer or older, the details may have shifted.

## Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.