Installing easy_install... to get to installing lxml

Question

I've come to grips with the fact that ElementTree isn't going to do what I want it to do. I've checked out the documentation for lxml, and it appears that it will serve my purposes. To get lxml, I need to get easy_install. So I downloaded it from here, and put it in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/. Then I went to that folder, and ran sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg.

That installed successfully. Then I got excited because I thought the whole point of easy_install was that I could then just install via easy_install lxml, and lxml would magically get downloaded, built, and installed properly, ready for my importing enjoyment. So I ran easy_install lxml. I pasted the results below. What should I do?

easy_install lxml Searching for lxml Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/lxml/ Reading http://codespeak.net/lxml Best match: lxml 2.2.6 Downloading http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxml-2.2.6.tgz Processing lxml-2.2.6.tgz Running lxml-2.2.6/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /var/folders/49/49N0+g5QFKCm51AbzMtghE+++TI/-Tmp-/easy_install-rxbP6K/lxml-2.2.6/egg-dist-tmp-fjakR0 Building lxml version 2.2.6. NOTE: Trying to build without Cython, pre-generated 'src/lxml/lxml.etree.c' needs to be available. Using build configuration of libxslt 1.1.12 Building against libxml2/libxslt in the following directory: /usr/lib unable to execute gcc-4.0: No such file or directory error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc-4.0' failed with exit status 1 

Answer 1

First off we don't use easy_install anymore. We use pip. Please use pip instead.

To get to your particular troubles, as the comments point out, you're missing GCC. On OS X, Xcode Command Line Tools provides GCC, as well as many other programs necessary for building software on OS X. For OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and newer, either install Xcode through the App Store, or alternatively, install only the Xcode Command Line Tools with

xcode-select --install 

For more details, please see the Apple Developer FAQ or search the web for "install Xcode Command Line Tools".

For older versions of OS X, you can get Xcode Command Line Tools from the downloads page of the Apple Developer website (free registration required).

Once you have GCC installed, you may still encounter errors during compilation if the C/C++ library dependencies are not installed on your system. On OS X, the Homebrew project is the easiest way to install and manage such dependencies. Follow the instructions on the Homebrew website to install Homebrew on your system, then issue

brew update brew install libxml2 libxslt 

Possibly causing further trouble in your case, you placed the downloaded setuptools in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/. Please do not download any files to this location. Instead, I suggest you download the file to your home directory, or your usual Downloads directory. After downloading it, you're supposed to run sh setuptools-X.Y.Z.egg, which will then install it properly into the appropriate site-packages and put the executable easy_install on your path.