How to pip install cairocffi?

Question

How do I install cairocffi through pip?

cairocffi is a CFFI-based drop-in replacement for Pycairo https://github.com/SimonSapin/cairocffi.

I'm trying to install it on Ubuntu 14.04:

alvas@ubi:~$ cat /etc/*-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="14.04.2 LTS, Trusty Tahr"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS"
VERSION_ID="14.04"
HOME_URL="http://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"

I've tried installing with the standard pip command but I get this:

$ sudo pip install cairocffi
The directory '/home/alvas/.cache/pip/log' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the debug log has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
The directory '/home/alvas/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
The directory '/home/alvas/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
Collecting cairocffi
  Downloading cairocffi-0.6.tar.gz (75kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 77kB 34kB/s 
Collecting cffi>=0.6 (from cairocffi)
  Downloading cffi-0.9.2.tar.gz (209kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 212kB 97kB/s 
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pycparser in /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages (from cffi>=0.6->cairocffi)
Installing collected packages: cffi, cairocffi
  Running setup.py install for cffi
    Complete output from command /usr/bin/python3 -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-d3kjzf__/cffi/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-ll323a3c-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    running install
    running build
    running build_py
    creating build
    creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4
    creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/commontypes.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/lock.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/api.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/verifier.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/cparser.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/backend_ctypes.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/vengine_gen.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/gc_weakref.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/ffiplatform.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/model.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/vengine_cpy.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    running build_ext
    building '_cffi_backend' extension
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/c
    x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -g -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fPIC -DUSE__THREAD -I/usr/include/ffi -I/usr/include/libffi -I/usr/include/python3.4m -c c/_cffi_backend.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/c/_cffi_backend.o
    c/_cffi_backend.c:13:17: fatal error: ffi.h: No such file or directory
     #include <ffi.h>
                     ^
    compilation terminated.
    error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1

    ----------------------------------------
    Command "/usr/bin/python3 -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-d3kjzf__/cffi/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-ll323a3c-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-d3kjzf__/cffi

I've manually checked the permission and I realized that there's no write access permission. Why is that so? And why isn't sudo working to overwrite the permission?

$ ls -la .cache/pip/log/
total 60
drwxrwxr-x 2 alvas alvas  4096 Feb  3 10:51 .
drwx------ 4 alvas alvas  4096 Apr 12 23:16 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 alvas alvas 49961 Apr 12 23:18 debug.log

When I tried sudo -H pip install cairoffi, I got:

sudo -H pip install cairocffi
Collecting cairocffi
  Using cached cairocffi-0.6.tar.gz
Collecting cffi>=0.6 (from cairocffi)
  Downloading cffi-0.9.2.tar.gz (209kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 212kB 29kB/s 
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pycparser in /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages (from cffi>=0.6->cairocffi)
Installing collected packages: cffi, cairocffi
  Running setup.py install for cffi
    Complete output from command /usr/bin/python3 -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-2sv6pbsp/cffi/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-xk4kkjrj-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    Package libffi was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libffi.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'libffi' found
    running install
    running build
    running build_py
    creating build
    creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4
    creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/commontypes.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/lock.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/api.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/verifier.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/cparser.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/backend_ctypes.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/vengine_gen.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/gc_weakref.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/ffiplatform.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/model.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    copying cffi/vengine_cpy.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/cffi
    running build_ext
    building '_cffi_backend' extension
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/c
    x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -g -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fPIC -DUSE__THREAD -I/usr/include/ffi -I/usr/include/libffi -I/usr/include/python3.4m -c c/_cffi_backend.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/c/_cffi_backend.o
    c/_cffi_backend.c:13:17: fatal error: ffi.h: No such file or directory
     #include <ffi.h>
                     ^
    compilation terminated.
    error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1

    ----------------------------------------
    Command "/usr/bin/python3 -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-2sv6pbsp/cffi/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-xk4kkjrj-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-2sv6pbsp/cffi

As @MattDMo suggested, i've tried apt-get install libffi but it still didn't work out:

alvas@ubi:~$ sudo apt-get install libffi libffi-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libffi

But there isn't any libffi on the package manager, so i've tried libffi-dev:

alvas@ubi:~$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libffi-dev
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 99.8 kB of archives.
After this operation, 323 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main libffi-dev amd64 3.1~rc1+r3.0.13-12 [99.8 kB]
Fetched 99.8 kB in 1s (76.3 kB/s)     
Selecting previously unselected package libffi-dev:amd64.
(Reading database ... 492855 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libffi-dev_3.1~rc1+r3.0.13-12_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libffi-dev:amd64 (3.1~rc1+r3.0.13-12) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for doc-base (0.10.5) ...
Processing 1 added doc-base file...
Processing triggers for install-info (5.2.0.dfsg.1-2) ...
Setting up libffi-dev:amd64 (3.1~rc1+r3.0.13-12) ...

It installs libffi-dev successfully but cairoffi is still not installing:

alvas@ubi:~$ sudo -H pip install cairoffi
Collecting cairoffi
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement cairoffi (from versions: )
  No matching distribution found for cairoffi
alvas@ubi:~$ sudo -H pip3 install cairoffi
Collecting cairoffi
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement cairoffi (from versions: )
  No matching distribution found for cairoffi

Answer 1

It's right in the error message:

No package 'libffi' found

You'll need to install libffi and libffi-dev through your distro's package manager (yum, apt-get, whatever) before the pip installation will work. Their names may very slightly from platform to platform.

Answer 2

Couldn't get it to work, even with libffi6 libffi-dev installed. Finally got it working with:

pip3 install -U pip
pip3 install -U setuptools
pip3 install --no-cache-dir cairocffi

--no-cache-dir was the trick, thanks to: https://github.com/Kozea/cairocffi/issues/125#issuecomment-476295293

Answer 3

For me, on Windows 10 using python 3.5.3rc1, pip install cairocffi was failing. Doing pip install cffi was sufficient to let it succeed.