No module named yaml (brew broke my python, again)

Question

homebrew has again broken python for about third time. Im now having issues getting dependencies to work again. At this point I am unable to install yaml.

Collecting yaml Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement yaml (from versions: ) No matching distribution found for yaml

Some other suggestions have said to try pyaml, which again simply tries to import yaml and fails Traceback (most recent call last): File "script.py", line 13, in <module> import pyaml File "/~/virtualenv/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyaml/__init__.py", line 6, in <module> import os, sys, io, yaml ImportError: No module named yaml

Anyone have an idea how to get this sorted out?

Answer 1

There are two packages with somewhat unfortunate naming in the Python Package Index.

• pip install pyyaml lets you import yaml. This package enables Python to parse YAML files.
• pip install pyaml lets you import pyaml. This package allows pretty-printing of YAML files from Python, among other things. It requires pyyaml to be installed.

So the way forward for you is:

1. Install pyyaml, preferably using pip
2. Install pyaml
3. Profit

Step 0 would be to run everything from a virtual environment to prevent homebrew from messing with your Python ever again. This option also lets you run multiple versions of Python, not just the one required by homebrew.