No module named 'matplotlib.pyplot'; 'matplotlib' is not a package

Question

Have found a similar issue, however haven't found proper solution.

Here's a code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1,2,3],[4,2,5])
plt.show()

Run, got the message:

ImportError: No module named 'matplotlib.pyplot'; 'matplotlib' is not a package

I run Linux Mint 18 with preinstalled python-2.7 and python-3.5 (I use python3), before that I was installing modules with a simple sudo apt-get install method and that worked great.

Before running this the code above, I've installed matplotlib in a usual way sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib. As it haven't worked out, started to look for solution.

Python location

which python3 /usr/bin/python3

Current Matplotlib installed

sudo find /usr | grep matplotlib /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/matplotlib

My tries:

1) I've removed matplotlib with autoremove, and tried to make it sudo apt-get install python3-matplotlib instead. Didn't worked out.

2) Used: pip3 install matplotlib or sudo pip3 install matplotlib. Received errors like:

command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build- ....

3) Then I found another solution:

sudo apt-get install virtualenv
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 py3env
source py3env/bin/activate
pip install matplotlib

Same outcome.

Haven't tried to use import sys sys.path.append('/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/')(proposed in link above), but as I am not sure what exactly this command does (quite a newbie to python and programming itself) - haven't risked.

Answer 1

If you are using pycharm and have matplotlib.py in your current working directory than you get this error. Just delete or rename the matplotlib.py file and it will work.