error in pipenv setup command: 'install_requires' must be a string or list of strings containing valid project/version requirement specifiers

Question

When I try to pipinstall pipenv I get the following error:

nathan@DESKTOP-KKB4QL2:/mnt/c/Users/Nathan/Dropbox$ pip install pipenv
Downloading/unpacking pipenv
  Downloading pipenv-11.7.1.tar.gz (5.0MB): 5.0MB downloaded
  Running setup.py (path:/tmp/pip_build_nathan/pipenv/setup.py) egg_info for package pipenv
    error in pipenv setup command: 'install_requires' must be a string or list of strings containing valid project/version requirement specifiers
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    error in pipenv setup command: 'install_requires' must be a string or list of strings containing valid project/version requirement specifiers

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...
Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip_build_nathan/pipenv
Storing debug log for failure in /home/nathan/.pip/pip.log

I've tried to update pip, but that just resulted in an exception.

Answer 1

Make sure you are using the correct version of pip. It's likely your pip defaults to 2.7, you can try pip3.6 or find in your system any/all versions of pip.

I had this exact issue when I tried

pip install --user pipenv

which was fixed when I tried (On MacOS sierra)

sudo -H pip3.6 install -U pipenv

Thanks