"Failed building wheel for psycopg2" - MacOSX using virtualenv and pip

Question

I'm attempting to make a website with a few others for the first time, and have run into a weird error when trying to use Django/Python/VirtualEnv. I've found solutions to this problem for other operating systems, such as Ubuntu, but can't find any good solutions for Mac.

This is the relevant code being run:

virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

After running that block, I get the following errors:

AssertionError

---

Failed building wheel for django-toolbelt Running setup.py bdist_wheel for psycopg2

...

AssertionError

---

Failed building wheel for psycopg2 Failed to build django-toolbelt psycopg2

I believe I've installed the "django-toolbelt" and "psycopg2", so I'm not sure why it would be failing.

The only difference I can think of is that I did not use the command

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

as was instructed for Ubuntu usage as I believe that installing postgresql with brew took care of the header.

Thanks for any help or insight!

Answer 1

I had the same problem on Arch linux. I think that it's not an OS dependant problem. Anyway, I fixed this by finding the outdated packages and updating then.

pip uninstall psycopg2
pip list --outdated
pip install --upgrade wheel
pip install --upgrade setuptools
pip install psycopg2

hope this helps...

Answer 2

For MacOS users

After trying all the above methods (which did not work for me on MacOS 10.14), that one worked :

• Install openssl with brew install openssl if you don't have it already.
• add openssl path to LIBRARY_PATH :

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/

• install psycopg2 with pip pip3 install psycopg2