Python. How to solve "setuptools must be installed to install from a source distribution"

Question

I have a Continuous Integration that works with Gitlab. When I deploy, it installs everything in my requirements.txt file with pip. However, when it gets to installing a package named cffi, it throws the error:

Downloading/unpacking cffi==1.10.0 (from -r requirements.txt (line 11)) Cleaning up...

setuptools must be installed to install from a source distribution

I am lost here. Tried adding "setuptools" to requirements.txt and adding a line that explicitly installs it, but it doesn't work.

gitlab.ci looks like this:

script:
        - "cp tests/test_settings.py app/local_settings.py"
        - "source /home/ci/misuper-venv/bin/activate"
        - pip install setuptools
        - "pip install -r requirements.txt"
        - "python manage.py migrate --noinput"

I'm completely lost here. Please help.

Answer 1

It's a known problem.

pip install -U setuptools
pip install -U pip

Just helped me.

Note: a reasonable person would never sudo pip install anything. OS's Python should be managed by the OS's package manager; strong-arming your system Python installation has been many times seen to break your OS in interesting ways.

To pip install anything, use virtualenv or an equivalent.