pypi UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'install_requires'

Question

python setup.py uses distutils which doesn't support install_requires. setuptools does, also distribute (its successor), and pip (which uses either) do. But you actually have to use them. I.e. call setuptools through the easy_install command or pip install.

Another way is to import setup from setuptools in your setup.py, but this not standard and makes everybody wanting to use your package have to have setuptools installed.

This was the first result on my google search, but had no answer. I found that upgrading setuptools resolved the issue for me (and pip for good measure)

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade setuptools

Hope this helps the next person to find this link!

I'm on a Mac with python 2.7.11. I have been toying with creating extremely simple and straightforward projects, where my only requirement is that I can run python setup.py install, and have setup.py use the setup command, ideally from distutils. There are literally no other imports or code aside from the kwargs to setup() other than what I note here.

I get the error when the imports for my setup.py file are:

from distutils.core import setup

When I use this, I get warnings such as

/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.11/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py:267: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'entry_points' warnings.warn(msg)

If I change the imports (and nothing else) to the following:

from distutils.core import setup
import setuptools  # noqa

The warnings go away.

Note that I am not using setuptools, just importing it changes the behavior such that it no longer emits the warnings. For me, this is the cause of a truly baffling difference where some projects I'm using give those warnings, and some others do not.

Clearly, some form of monkey-patching is going on, and it is affected by whether or not that import is done. This probably isn't the situation for everyone researching this problem, but for the narrow environment in which I'm working, this is the answer I was looking for.

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This is consistent with the other (community) comment, which says that distutils should monkeypatch setuptools, and that they had the problem when installing Ansible. Ansible appears to have tried to allow installs without having setuptools in the past, and then went back on that.

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/setup.py

A lot of stuff is up in the air... but if you're looking for a simple answer for a simple project, you should probably just import setuptools.

ATTENTION! ATTENTION! Imperfect answer ahead. To get the "latest memo" on the state of packaging in the Python universe, read this fairly detailed essay.

I have just ran into this problem when trying to build/install ansible. The problem seems to be that distutils really doesn't support install_requires. Setuptools should monkey-patch distutils on-the-fly, but it doesn't, probably because the last release of setuptools is 0.6c11 from 2009, whereas distutils is a core Python project.

So even after manually installing the setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg running setup.py only picks up distutils dist.py, and not the one from site-packages/setuptools/.

Also the setuptools documentation hints to using ez_setup and not distutils.

However, setuptools is itself provided by distribute nowadays, and that flavor of setup() supports install_requires.

This is a warning from distutils, and is a sign that you do not have setuptools installed. Installing it from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools will remove the warning.