/usr/bin/python3: Error while finding spec for 'virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader' (<class 'ImportError'>: No module named 'virtualenvwrapper')

Question

I'm trying to follow How To Serve Django Applications with uWSGI and Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 and I'm failing at the very earlier stage, due to amount of output, I placed all related information into Pastebin.com - #1 paste tool since 2002!.

the actual error:

root@alexus:~# echo "source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" >> ~/.bashrc
root@alexus:~# source ~/.bashrc
/usr/bin/python3: Error while finding spec for 'virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader' (<class 'ImportError'>: No module named 'virtualenvwrapper')
virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks.

If Python could not import the module virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader,
check that virtualenvwrapper has been installed for
VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3 and that PATH is
set properly.
root@alexus:~#

I'm following how to to the teeth, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I faced similar problem, when using python3 with virtualenvwrapper,

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Then install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper from pip3,

sudo pip3 install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

then source it again,

source $HOME/.bashrc 

Answer 2

Thanks to @Alexander, I was able to fix my issue by changing the line in ~/.bashrc:

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3

to

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python

due to backwards compatibility.

Answer 3

I encountered a similar issue with virtualenvwrapper complaining not being to find virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader. I was able to narrow down to this particular line in my .bash_profile

source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

as seen below

$ source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
/usr/local/opt/python3/bin/python3.6: Error while finding module specification for 'virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader' (ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'virtualenvwrapper')
virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks. 

If Python could not import the module virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader,
check that virtualenvwrapper has been installed for
VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python3 and that PATH is
set properly.

After some trial and error, it turns out that a reinstallation of the virtualenvwrapper package resolved it. This was a manifest of the fact that I recently upgrade python3 (from version 3.5.2 to 3.6.1) via homebrew and in turn it broke virtualenvwrapper's shell script that hardcoded references to the older version of python3 (in my case it was 3.5.2). In short, this below line should fix it (at least in my case it did).

pip3 install virtualenvwrapper

Answer 4

In macOS Sierra, If you installed virtualenv package using pip3, add following to .bash_profile

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python3

or

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=$(which python3)

after that every new virtualenvironment you created using workon myvenv uses python3 as python interpreter