Installing Twisted through pip broken on one server

Question

I am setting up a virtualenv on a new server, and when I used pip on our requirements file, it kept dying on Twisted. I commented the Twisted line out, and everything else installed fine. At the command line, this is the output I see when I try to install Twisted (the same error I see when I run the entire requirements file once it gets to the Twisted line):

(foo)company@server:~$ pip install twisted Collecting twisted   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement twisted (from versions: ) No matching distribution found for twisted 

I can install Twisted fine from my dev machine and other servers, and on this server I seem to be able to install other packages fine.

Case and version do not matter. Same result if I use "twisted", "Twisted", "Twisted==15.2.1".

This is an EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.04.02.

Answer 1

Ok after struggling with this for several hours, I figured out the problem.

Running pip install --verbose twisted helped with the diagnosis.

The error message is misleading. The problem is that I built a custom installation of Python 2.7.10 without having previously installed libbz2-dev. So the steps to fix this were:

1. sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
2. cd /<untarred python source dir>
3. ./configure --prefix=<my install path> --enable-ipv6
4. make
5. make install

With this done, I can now create virtual environments and pip install Twisted.