Error installing Gensim: "Could not import setuptools which is required to install from a source distribution."

Question

Im trying to install gensim using pip but i'm getting:

"Could not import setuptools which is required to install from a source distribution.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 377, in setup_py
import setuptools  # noqa
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 11, in <module>
from setuptools.extern.six.moves import filterfalse, map
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/setuptools/extern/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
from pkg_resources.extern import VendorImporter
ImportError: No module named extern"

Other posts have suggested running

 pip install -U setuptools

which reports to have successfully installed the package.

Installing collected packages: setuptools
Successfully installed setuptools-21.0.0

However, running the gensim pip install command:

pip install gensim

just gives the first error again.

any ideas why this might be happening?

Answer 1

I had a very similar issue when installing SciPy Stack.

Try to use: pip install --user setuptools

Instead of using: pip install -U setuptools

Answer 2

I had a similar error with another library. It took me two steps, but it could be overkill.

# apt-get install python-setuptools
# pip install -U setuptools