pip finds package with search but won't install it

Question

When I run pip search linkchecker I get

linkchecker               - check websites and HTML documents for broken links

But when I try pip install linkchecker I get

  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement linkchecker

What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

pip uses http://pypi.python.org/simple/<package name> to look for download links, and this package points to a kind of "non-obvious" target. pip looks for tarballs/zips in the source page, but can't find a suitable url.

Use -vvv to see how pip looks for this package:

pip install linkchecker -vvv 

You may realize http://pypi.python.org/simple/linkchecker/ points to http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkchecker/files/, and there is no .tar.gz as href, only as content, and pip can't handle it.

In this case you could try this:

pip install http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkchecker/files/latest/download?source=files#egg=linkchecker -vvvv 

Answer 2

update pip first.

pip install --upgrade pip

then, you can try install it again.