No module named pkg_resources

I had this problem when I had activated my virtualenv as a different user than the one who created it. It seems to be a permission problem. I discovered this when I tried the answer by @cwc and saw this in the output:

Installing easy_install script to /path/env/bin
error: /path/env/bin/easy_install: Permission denied

Switching back to the user that created the virtualenv, then running the original pip install command went without problems. Hope this helps!

I had this problem today as well. I only got the problem inside the virtual env.

The solution for me was deactivating the virtual env, deleting and then uninstalling virtualenv with pip and reinstalling it. After that I created a new virtual env for my project, then pip worked fine both inside the virtual environment as in the normal environment.

It also happened to me. I think the problem will happen if the requirements.txt contains a “distribute” entry while the virtualenv uses setuptools. Pip will try to patch setuptools to make room for distribute, but unfortunately it will fail half way.

The easy solution is delete your current virtualenv then make a new virtualenv with –distribute argument.

An example if using virtualenvwrapper:

$ deactivate
$ rmvirtualenv yourenv
$ mkvirtualenv yourenv --distribute
$ workon yourenv
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

I have seen this error while trying to install rhodecode to a virtualenv on ubuntu 13.10. For me the solution was to run

pip install --upgrade setuptools
pip install --upgrade distribute 

before I run easy_install rhodecode.

I fixed the error with virtualenv by doing this:

Copied pkg_resources.py from

/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/setuptools

to

/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/

This may be a cheap workaround, but it worked for me.

.

If setup tools doesn’t exist, you can try installing system-site-packages by typing virtualenv --system-site-packages /DESTINATION DIRECTORY, changing the last part to be the directory you want to install to. pkg_rousources.py will be under that directory in lib/python2.7/site-packages

For me, this error was being caused because I had a subdirectory called “site”! I don’t know if this is a pip bug or not, but I started with:

/some/dir/requirements.txt
/some/dir/site/

pip install -r requirements.txt wouldn’t work, giving me the above error!

renaming the subfolder from “site” to “src” fixed the problem! Maybe pip is looking for “site-packages”? Crazy.

I had this error earlier and the highest rated answer gave me an error trying to download the ez_setup.py file. I found another source so you can run the command:

curl http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py | python

I found that I also had to use sudo to get it working, so you may need to run:

sudo curl http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py | sudo python

I’ve also created another location that the script can be downloaded from:

https://gist.github.com/ajtrichards/42e73562a89edb1039f3

I came across this answer when I was trying to follow this guide for OSX. What worked for me was, after running python get-pip, I had to ALSO easy_install pip. That fixed the issue of not being able to run pip at all. I did have a bunch of old macport stuff installed. That may have conflicted.

Apparently you’re missing setuptools. Some virtualenv versions use distribute instead of setuptools by default. Use the --setuptools option when creating the virtualenv or set the VIRTUALENV_SETUPTOOLS=1 in your environment.

On windows, I installed pip downloaded from www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ then encontered this problem.

So I should have installed setuptools(easy_install) first.

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python-pkg-resources

fixed it for me in Debian. Seems like uninstalling some .deb packages (twisted set in my case) has broken the path python uses to find packages

In CentOS 6 installing the package python-setuptools fixed it.

yum install python-setuptools

just reinstall your setuptools by :

$ sudo wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11.tar.gz#md5=7df2a529a074f613b509fb44feefefe74e
$ tar -zxvf setuptools-0.6c11.tar.gz
$ cd setuptools-0.6c11/
$ sudo python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ sudo pip install --upgrade setuptools

then everything will be fine.

I use CentOS 6.7, and my python was just upgrade from 2.6.6 to 2.7.11, after tried so many different answer, finally the following one does the job:

sudo yum install python-devel

Hope help someone in the same situation.

Looks like they have moved away from bitbucket and are now on github (https://github.com/pypa/setuptools)

Command to run is:

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python

None of the posted answers worked for me, so I reinstalled pip and it worked!

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential 

sudo easy_install pip 

pip install --upgrade setuptools

(reference: http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2010/02/how-install-pip-ubuntu/)

For me, it turned out to be a permissions problem on site-packages. Since it’s only my dev environment, I raised the permissions and everything is working again:

sudo chmod -R a+rwx /path/to/my/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/

I ran into this problem after updating my Ubuntu build. It seems to have gone through and removed set up tools in all of my virtual environments.

To remedy this I reinstalled the virtual environment back into the target directory. This cleaned up missing setup tools and got things running again.

e.g.:

~/RepoDir/TestProject$ virtualenv TestEnvironmentDir

For me a good fix was to use --no-download option to virtualenv (VIRTUALENV_NO_DOWNLOAD=1 tox for tox.)

On Opensuse 42.1 the following fixed this issue:

zypper in python-Pygments

Needed a little bit more sudo. Then used easy_install to install pip. Works.

sudo wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python
sudo easy_install pip

ImportError: No module named pkg_resources: the solution is to reinstall python pip using the following Command are under.

Step: 1 Login in root user.

sudo su root

Step: 2 Uninstall python-pip package if existing.

apt-get purge -y python-pip

Step: 3 Download files using wget command(File download in pwd )

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

Step: 4 Run python file.

python ./get-pip.py

Step: 5 Finaly exicute installation command.

apt-get install python-pip

Note: User must be root.

I experienced that error in my Google App Engine environment. And pip install -t lib setuptools fixed the issue.

After trying several of these answers, then reaching out to a colleague, what worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04 was:

pip install --force-reinstall -U setuptools
pip install --force-reinstall -U pip

In my case, it was only an old version of pillow 3.1.1 that was having trouble (pillow 4.x worked fine), and that’s now resolved!

If you are using Python 3, you should use pip3 instead of pip. The command looks like $ pip3 install requirements.txt

I have had the same problem when I used easy-install to install pip for python 2.7.14. For me the solution was (might not be the best, but worked for me, and this is probably the simplest) that the folder that contained the easy-install.py also contained a folder pkg_resources, and i have copy-pasted this folder into the same folder where my pip-script.py script was (python27Scripts).
Since then, I found it in the python27Libsite-packagespip-9.0.1-py2.7.eggpip_vendor folder as well, it might be a better solution to modify the pip-script.py file to import this.

yum -y install python-setuptools

i configure the Ceph there is a problem execute command "$ ceph-deploy new node1",
and I execute the command "$ yum -y install python-setuptools",
then the problem is gone.Thanks

If you are encountering this issue with an application installed via conda, the solution (as stated in this bug report) is simply to install setup-tools with:

conda install setuptools

On Windows, with python 3.7, this worked for me:

pip install --upgrade setuptools --user

--user installs packages in your home directory, which doesn’t require admin privileges.

In my case, I had 2 python versions installed initially and later I had deleted the older one. So while creating the virtual environment

virtualenv venv

was referring to the uninstalled python

What worked for me

python3 -m virtualenv venv

Same is true when you are trying to use pip.

the simple resoluition is that you can use conda to upgrade setuptools or entire enviroment. (Specially for windows user.)

conda upgrade -c anaconda setuptools

if the setuptools is removed, you need to install setuptools again.

conda install -c anaconda setuptools

if these all methodes doesn’t work, you can upgrade conda environement. But I do not recommend that you need to reinstall and uninstall some packages because after that it will exacerbate the situation.

A lot of answers are recommending the following but if you read through the source of that script, you’ll realise it’s deprecated.

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python

If your pip is also broken, this won’t work either.

pip install setuptools

I found I had to run the command from Ensure pip, setuptools, and wheel are up to date, to get pip working again.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

You can use the command
sudo apt-get install --reinstall python3-pkg-resources
if you are using python3 , this was the case with me.

I ran into this problem after installing the latest Python version 3.10.4.
Somehow, the setuptools package and pip were deleted.

I used the following command to resolve the issue :
in [Windows]

py -m ensurepip --default-pip

In my case, I did:

pip install -U poetry

I encountered this error in a poetry environment.

Steps I took to resolve it:

1. Add setuptools as a dev dependency with

poetry add --dev setuptools

2. Install setuptools in the poetry env using

poetry run pip install setuptools

I caused this error (or very similar) by removing the "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/" directory from my machine thinking it was a local cache. Only easy_install stopped working (pip was fine).

None of the items listed here helped me but I was able to recover by downloading the latest from https://www.python.org/downloads/ and installing it. Luckily I was not on latest, as I believe otherwise I would have had to reinstall.

I suspect (but not 100% sure) I also needed to open a new terminal (or new tab in terminal) to have it work.