Installed module via pip, still get ModuleNotFoundError

Question

I’m trying to use w3af to start doing some routine security testing on a webapp that I’m using. Install instructions recommend cloning a git repo, then running the python code and seeing what dependencies are unmet then installing them. My first run yielded:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ConfigParser

OK, no problem, right?

$ pip install ConfigParser
Collecting ConfigParser
Downloading configparser-5.2.0-py3-none-any.whl (19 kB)
Installing collected packages: ConfigParser
Successfully installed ConfigParser-5.2.0

Mission accomplished, let’s try again!

$ ./w3af_console
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./w3af_console", line 12, in <module>
    from w3af.core.controllers.dependency_check.dependency_check import dependency_check
  File "/Users/westonx/bin/w3af/w3af/core/controllers/dependency_check/dependency_check.py", line 26, in <module>
    from w3af.core.data.db.startup_cfg import StartUpConfig
  File "/Users/westonx/bin/w3af/w3af/core/data/db/startup_cfg.py", line 22, in <module>
    import ConfigParser
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ConfigParser'

Hmmm. Could swear we took care of that. Let’s run pip (maybe pip3?) again to be sure?

$ pip3 install ConfigParser
Requirement already satisfied: ConfigParser in /Users/westonx/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python3.8/site-packages (5.2.0)

Seems good. Let’s check to see if the import path includes that directory:

$ python -c "import sys; print('n'.join(sys.path)); import ConfigParser;"

/Users/westonx/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python38.zip
/Users/westonx/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python3.8
/Users/westonx/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python3.8/lib-dynload
/Users/westonx/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python3.8/site-packages
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ConfigParser'

So… we know the sys.path includes the directory pip says the module is installed in, but when we import it, python insists it’s not there.

configparser-5.2.0.dist-info and configparser.py are indeed in my ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/lib/python3.8/site-packages directory, so it doesn’t look like pip telling me something that’s not true. But it sure looks like python is.

I’m using pyenv on MacOS 10.14, not sure if that makes a difference. Anyone have ideas of what next steps should be?

Asked By: Weston C

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Source

Answer 1

ConfigParser is a built in library in Python, but its name was changed to configparser in Python 3. It appears like w3af is still using Python 2 (I found this check that actively states it, but you never even got that far). So, to run this code, you need to run it with Python 2.

Answered By: M.O.

Answer 2

There are very many (thousands) of python3 compatibility issues with the w3af codebase. The ConfigParser issue is just the first one you hit – the codebase is full of references to outdated / unmaintained libraries, and has no support for python3 byte strings vs. unicode strings (b"" vs ""), which are used throughout the codebase.

There is a w4af project on Github, where someone has made the effort to port all the w3af code to python3, but you didn’t hear that from me.

Answered By: codders

Installed module via pip, still get ModuleNotFoundError

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