Python AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

Question

A Python script of mine is failing with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./inspect_sheet.py", line 21, in <module>
    main()
  File "./inspect_sheet.py", line 12, in main
    workbook_name=workbook_name,
  File "./google_sheets.py", line 56, in __init__
    self.login()
  File "./google_sheets.py", line 46, in login
    self.client = gspread.authorize(credentials)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gspread/client.py", line 335, in authorize
    client.login()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gspread/client.py", line 98, in login
    self.auth.refresh(http)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 598, in refresh
    self._refresh(http.request)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 769, in _refresh
    self._do_refresh_request(http_request)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 795, in _do_refresh_request
    body = self._generate_refresh_request_body()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1425, in _generate_refresh_request_body
    assertion = self._generate_assertion()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1554, in _generate_assertion
    private_key, self.private_key_password), payload)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2client/crypt.py", line 162, in from_string
    from OpenSSL import crypto
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/__init__.py", line 8, in <module>
    from OpenSSL import rand, crypto, SSL
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/SSL.py", line 118, in <module>
    SSL_ST_INIT = _lib.SSL_ST_INIT
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

Ironworker

I run in this problem with debian-jessie, upgraded package python-openssl (16.0.0-1~bpo8+1) from jessie-backports doesn't work too, so I have to upgrade it using pip according to solutions bellow (used version was 18.0.0) – Giddy

Answer 1

Turned out the problem was with my installation of pyOpenSSL, pyOpenSSL-0.15.1 .

I did:

pip uninstall pyopenssl

and then

pip install pyopenssl

...and my Python script worked again!

Ironworker

i had trouble running pip itself, this solved it sudo easy_install pyOpenSSL – Cultivation

Had just upgraded cryptography; your solution was sufficient in my case – Percolation

In my case I had to uninstalled like this: sudo aptitude purge python-openssl because it was installed with aptitude. I think I could do the same with apt-get – Sigler

I got the error every time I ran pip. So did rm -rf cryptography and could run pip again. – Refuel

This issue prevented me from successfully running pip. So, I had to remove cryptography from lib/python2.7/site-packages before following Ben's instructions. – Leena

Why did you need to uninstall it? You can simply just upgrade pyopenssl, that will have the same effect as uninstalling and installing it back: pip install --upgrade pyopenssl. – Leningrad

I had the issue "module ‘lib’ has no attribute ‘ERR_load_RAND_strings’" during pipp installation on system python 3.9 of a Raspberry Pi OS on Pi 4 1GB. pip upgrade or easy_install give this error, whereas uninstalling pyopenssl and reinstalling it works. There is a warning that 21.0.0 is higher than the flask requirement of 17.0.0, but that's ignorable. – Huonghupeh

Answer 2

Upgrading pyopenssl with pip was not working as none of the commands related to to pip was working for me. By upgrading pyopenssl with easy_install, above problem can be solved.

sudo python -m easy_install --upgrade pyOpenSSL

credit @delimiter (Answer)

Noto

Thanks! I had to restart my terminal / log back into my server after this command, and pip worked fine after that. – Way

meet the new error -error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1 – Gamopetalous

This is helpful, probably, but even logging out and back in again, I am still getting the AttributeError in the OP. – Duckling

this one worked! it fixed openSSL error for me ( module 'lib' has no attribute 'X509_V_FLAG_CB_ISSUER_CHECK') – Hyland

Answer 3

Update your pyopenssl module:

$ sudo pip install -U pyopenssl

Cull

Thanks, I figure that is more efficient than uninstalling and installing again. – Ironworker

if you use a virtualenv you don't need sudo. – Liberality

Answer 4

I had a similar error:

    from OpenSSL import rand, crypto, SSL
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/OpenSSL/SSL.py", line 112, in <module>
    SSL_ST_INIT = _lib.SSL_ST_INIT
AttributeError: module 'lib' has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

and none of the other answers could fix it, because pip could not install anything. Instead, what I did was this from the terminal first:

sudo rm -r /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/OpenSSL

Then reinstalled pyopenssl with pip:

sudo pip install pyopenssl

and everything was gravy.

Accept

Worth noting: if you use virtualenv then probably you need to remove rm -r ~/.virtualenvs/YourEnv/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/OpenSSL – Phonotypy

Answer 5

Try with the following commands:

easy_install -U pip
easy_install -U pyOpenSSL

Inexpensive

Answer 6

I experienced the same issue recently and after few hours investigation, I found out that it was caused by New cryptography 2.0 upgrade. This upgrade will break many packages using pyopenssl (like Sentry, Google Analytics and etc). Just downgrade it to 1.9 will solve the problem.

Be cautious if you are using "pip install -U", it will automatically upgrade packages that are not listed in requirements.txt.

Padlock

Thanks, this worked. Upgrading pyopenssl wasn't sufficient for me. – Intonate

Answer 7

In my case, the problem was that the package was installed in root directories, and I was executing the script which asked for pyopenssl with my Linux user forvas. And that user can't use the libraries installed in root.

So first I had to remove the package with aptitude or apt-get.

sudo aptitude purge python-openssl

Therefore, I had to install the package again, but taking into account the user who is executing the script which is asking for the library. Take a look to where the library is installed depending on the Linux user and the argument --user of pip.

Case 1

forvas@server:$ pip install pyopenssl

Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError:

[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL'

Consider using the --user option or check the permissions.

Case 2

forvas@server:$ sudo pip install pyopenssl

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL/*

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pyOpenSSL-17.5.0.dist-info/*

Case 3

forvas@server:$ sudo pip install --user pyopenssl

/home/forvas/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/*

/home/forvas/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyOpenSSL-17.5.0.dist-info/*

Case 4

root@server:$ pip install pyopenssl

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL/*

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pyOpenSSL-17.5.0.dist-info/*

Case 5

root@server:$ pip install --user pyopenssl

/root/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/*

/root/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyOpenSSL-17.5.0.dist-info/*

Conclusion

My problem was that the library was installed in the directories of the case 5.

Solution

• Uninstalling the package.

• As I'm executing the script with Linux user forvas, I was able to reinstall the package rightly with the options 2 or 4 (in which the library is available for all Linux users) or more accurate, the option 3 (in which library is only available for Linux user forvas).

Dusk

How would this look for Python 3? – Duckling

Following this example, case 3 for instance would be sudo python3 -m pip install --user pyopenssl, and the packages would be stored in /home/forvas/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages. – Dusk

Answer 8

I had the same issue and as pip wasn't working anymore I had to do his job manually:

wget https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/40/d0/8efd61531f338a89b4efa48fcf1972d870d2b67a7aea9dcf70783c8464dc/pyOpenSSL-19.0.0.tar.gz
tar -xzvf pyOpenSSL-19.0.0.tar.gz
cd pyOpenSSL-19.0.0
sudo python setup.py install

After that everything worked as expected.

Depose

Answer 9

My problem was caused by the version of Python openssl that was in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/.

dpkg -l | grep openssl showed:

ii  python-openssl                                0.15.1-2build1                               all          Python 2 wrapper around the OpenSSL library

I removed it using sudo apt-get remove python-openssl. I then ran the following to install the distribution version of pip.

curl -o ./get-pip.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo python2 ./get-pip.py

pip --version now displays:

pip 18.0 from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip (python 2.7)

I was then able to perform the necessary pip install I was trying to complete.

Cryogenics

Thanks @heatfanjohn. I was in the exact same situation as yours and it works as you've written! – Revolt

Answer 10

This worked for me:

sudo apt remove python-openssl

Instrumentation

Answer 11

I saw the AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT' error too.

Doing

sudo pip install pyOpenSSL==16.2.0

resolved it for me.

Norval

Answer 12

Just in case anyone else isn't finding exactly the right incantations to make this work, as of Nov 2018 the thing that worked for me was:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL/ sudo apt install --reinstall python-openssl

Good luck!

Acis

Answer 13

I had this problem on MacOS with python 2 and 3 installed via brew. It turns out that brew uninstalling python and python@2 does not remove any libraries which were installed for those versions of python; i.e. in:

/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ and
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/

Something in there was not right, so what worked for me was to delete/move all the installed libraries for brew's python 2 and 3 and start again (and make sure only to use virtualenvs from here on):

brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python@2
brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/python3.7 ~/python3.7libs-backup
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/python2.7 ~/python2.7libs-backup
brew install python
brew install python@2

Hebron

Answer 14

I get AttributeError: module 'lib' has no attribute 'ERR_load_RAND_strings' on a freshly installed Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) Buster Lite 32bit after pip installing a few packages with pip. A combination of the other answers works:

sudo rm -r /usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/OpenSSL
sudo pip uninstall --yes pyopenssl
sudo pip install pyopenssl

The first command will not actually remove the package installation, just its files, but uninstall without it will raise the same error. Obviously we are dealing with a Pi so the last will be:

sudo pip install pyopenssl --no-cache-dir

(I thought I'd reiterate the others as this Q does not come up in the search for the issue (it does via an ESP32 forum via Google) so I am repeating it with more keywords for the Pi)

Huonghupeh

Answer 15

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 16.04, but with the following twist: when virtualenv was activated (. venv/bin/activate before running celery workers with pysolr, requests, etc in my case) - everything worked perfectly, but when I ran celery from command line using full paths, and python paths - there was a problem (and same problem running from supervisord ). Also, if important, virtualenv has been bundled elsewhere on the machine with same Ubuntu version.

Solution was simple: adding /full/path/to/venv/bin to PATH ( as advised here https://serverfault.com/questions/331027/supervisord-how-to-append-to-path ) solved this.

Unfortunately, I have not yet pin-pointed what kind of update caused this, but hopefully this may help someone.

Eustatius

Answer 16

I was seeing similar python stack dump on the console of my Ubuntu 16.04 VM when I tried ssh into the VM.

SSL_ST_INIT = _lib.SSL_ST_INIT
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

pip reported that pyopenssl was not installed.

I had to do this instead:

sudo apt install --reinstall python-openssl

Drislane

Answer 17

In my case, It was throwing the same error for uninstalling and upgrading. I couldn't uninstall or upgrade.

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

Following worked for me.

# rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/
# rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyOpenSSL-16.1.0.dist-info
# rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyOpenSSL-18.0.0-py2.7.egg
# pip2.7 install pyopenssl
Collecting pyopenssl
Downloading 
.
.
100% |████████████████████████████████| 61kB 5.8MB/s 
Collecting cryptography>=2.2.1 (from pyopenssl)
.
.
Installing collected packages: cryptography, pyopenssl
Found existing installation: cryptography 1.7.2
Uninstalling cryptography-1.7.2:
  Successfully uninstalled cryptography-1.7.2
Successfully installed cryptography-2.2.2 pyopenssl-18.0.0

WARNING: Try this only if upgrading(sudo pip install pyOpenSSL==16.2.0) or uninstalling(pip uninstall pyopenssl) doesn't help

Ecclesiastical

Answer 18

I just encountered this on my Ubuntu 16.04 host. There appears to be a version conflict between the apt repo packages for python-openssl and python-crypotgraphy, vs what someone installed manually with pip into /usr/local/python2.7/dist-packages.

Once it got into this state, the system standard pip couldn't execute, either. I got around the chicken-and-egg problem by manually setting a PYTHONPATH environment variable that excluded the /usr/local part of the tree thusly:

    $ export PYTHONPATH="/usr/lib/python2.7:/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0"
    $ /usr/bin/pip uninstall cryptography
    $ unset PYTHONPATH

I acquired the above list of library directories to use with the python shell:

    import sys
    for p in sys.path:
       print(p)

and then copying everything listed except the one /usr/local directory. Your system may have a different list in its path. Adjust accordingly.

I also had some manual apt-get install --reinstall python-openssl python-cryptography commands scattered in my bash history, which may or may not have been necessary.

Embark

Answer 19

Try with:

export PYTHONPATH="/usr/lib/python2.7:/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0"
sudo apt-get install --reinstall python-openssl

Uninterrupted

Answer 20

My solution was a lot more simplistic after these other solutions not working for me. Anything I tried to install/uninstall via pip returned the same error and stacktrace.

I ended up trying to update pip via pip3 and it worked flawlessly:

pip3 install --upgrade pip

I went back to using pip and everything worked correctly. I did notice that it was referencing Python 3.6 when running the pip commands though.

# pip install pyopenssl`enter code here`
Requirement already satisfied: pyopenssl in /usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages (18.0.0)

<snipped>

Requirement already satisfied: pycparser in /usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages (from cffi!=1.11.3,>=1.7->cryptography>=2.2.1->pyopenssl) (2.19)

Cakewalk

Answer 21

Did research on the error. Then I reinstall and upgrade OpenSSL and Cryptography.

sudo pip3 install pyOpenSSL --upgrade
sudo pip3 install cryptography --upgrade

Gibeonite

Answer 22

This is an older post, so I'm answering to hopefully help someone in late 2019... my problem had to do with Python 2 vs 3. I'm using Python 3 exclusively; no more legacy Python. But my OS (eg, Ubuntu 16.04) still has Python 2.7 installed. Thus when running global pip by default (eg, not in a virtualenv), I was calling the Python 2 version of pip.

For me, I used the following to fix this issue.

Uninstall docker-compose:

sudo pip3 uninstall docker-compose  
sudo pip uninstall docker-compose

Reinstall docker-compose for my version of Python:

sudo pip3 install docker-compose

Demoiselle

Answer 23

I’m running running OSX 10.15.5 Catalina and using pyenv.

Having tried a number of other solutions on this page what worked for me is:

pyenv uninstall 3.6.8
pyenv install 3.6.8

I have to admit I'm not sure why this resolved this issue, because I had only installed this version of Python fairly recently.

Glossectomy