Pip doesn't install packages to activated virtualenv, ignores requirements.txt

Asked 3/9, 2013 at 23:57 Answered 3/10, 2015 at 18:18

python django git virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

I am attempting to setup a development environment on my new dev machine at home. I have just installed Ubuntu and now I am attempting to clone a remote repo from our web-server and install its dependencies so I can begin work.

So far I have manually installed virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper from pypi and edited my bash.rc appropriately to source my virtualenvs when i start my terminal. I then cloned my repo to ~/projects/project-name/websitename.com. Then I used virtualenvwrapper to mkvirtualenv env-name from ~/projects/project-name/websitename.com. This reflects exactly the file-structure/setup of the web-server I am cloning from. So far so good.

I logged into the dev server and activate the virtualenv there and use pip freeze -l > req.txt to render a dependencies list and scp to my local machine. I activate the virtualenv on my local machine, navigate to the ~/projects/project-name/websitename.com and execute pip install -r path-to-req.txt and it runs through all of the dependencies as if nothing is wrong. However, when i attempt to manage.py syncdb i get an error about not finding core django packages. What the hell? So i figure somehow Django failed to install, i run pip install Django==1.5.1 and it completes successfully. I got to setup my site again and get another error about no module named django_extensions. Okay, what the hell with it, i just installed all of these packages with pip?!

So i pip freeze -l > test.txt and cat test.txt, what does it list? Django==1.5.1, the one package I just manually installed. Why isn't pip installing my dependencies from my specified list into my virtualenv? What am I messing up here?

-EDIT-------------

Which pip gives me the path to pip in my virtualenv

I have only 1 virtualenv and it is activated

Leatheroid answered 3/9, 2013 at 23:57 Comment(8)

Everything you are doing seems ok, try to debug with which pip. – Lurleen 4/9, 2013 at 0:15

also try find ~/.virtualenvs -type d -iname "anypackage" to see if your required packages are installed or not. Also I recommend using https://gist.github.com/insin/1425703 which will give nice prompt about activated virtualenv in your bash. – Valeda 4/9, 2013 at 0:22

running your command, the only packages in my virtualenv is the one I manually asked pip to install Django, all others processed by pip in the requirements file were ignored. I also somehow get a nice prompt indicating which virtualenv I have activated. – Leatheroid 4/9, 2013 at 0:28

I can only recommend going through pip install -r again and see if any error is occuring in some specific package. You seem to do everything okay. – Valeda 4/9, 2013 at 0:38

@sagarchalis Okay, i will try this shortly. As you said, something must be failing somewhere.. – Leatheroid 4/9, 2013 at 0:40

I recently encountered this problem on my Fedora Core 19 box.pip install -r requirements.txt wouldnt work for me. However, when I went through the list manually e.g. pip install Cython it worked fine. – Lawtun 4/12, 2013 at 7:27

I encountered this symptom for Python 3 and found this page: github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/532 - it was solved by upgrading the installed version of virtualenv from 1.11 to 1.11.2 – Significancy 27/1, 2014 at 21:42

what is happening when you download the package manually and install using setup.py – Covarrubias 11/9, 2014 at 4:53

My usual workflow is to

pip freeze > someFile.txt

and then install with

pip install -r someFile.txt

So I'm certain that this should work just fine. Unfortunately I can't really tell you anything besides make sure to check that

You really are in the virtualenv that you think you are in. Make sure to run
```
workon yourVirtualEnvName
```
to activate it just in case that matters.
Make sure to check that pip is within your virtualenv.
```
which pip
```
gives me
```
/path/to/home/.virtualenvs/myVirtEnv/bin/pip
```

Sorry I can't give you a more concrete answer. I have to do this semi-regularly and I've never had a problem with it skipping dependencies. Best of luck!

Cummins answered 4/9, 2013 at 0:12 Comment(2)

Huh, yeah, im running pip install -r someFile.txt and I even watch as it says it's downloading and installing but then the packages don't exist. For example it says: Downloading/unpacking django-extensions==1.1.1 (from -r req.txt (line 14)) Downloading django-extensions-1.1.1.tar.gz (149kB): 149kB downloaded Running setup.py egg_info for package django-extensions . But django-extensions doens't appear to be installed and still causes an error when called. It also doesn't appear when I pip freeze.. – Leatheroid 4/9, 2013 at 0:15

did you file a solution to this? I am having the exact same problem. – Journalistic 23/11, 2013 at 8:38

Struggled with some variation of this issue not long ago; it ended up being my cluttered .bash_profile file.

Make sure you don't have anything that might mess up your virtualenv inside your .bash_profile/.bashrc, such as $VIRTUAL_ENV or $PYTHONHOME or $PYTHONPATH environment variables.

Matrilateral answered 16/9, 2014 at 13:14 Comment(0)

I know this is an old post, but I just encountered a similar problem. In my case the cause was that I was running the pip install command using sudo. This made the command run globally and the packages install in the global python path.

Hope that helps somebody.

Haleakala answered 3/10, 2015 at 18:18 Comment(0)

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