Wheel installation from within requirements.txt

Question

I'm trying to configure my requirements.txt which is the following:

wheel
apache-airflow

I created python3.8 -m venv ~/test-env and tried to do the installation. The problem is

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

produces tons of messages

error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'                                                                                                                                                                                            

----------------------------------------                                                                                                                                                                                        
Failed building wheel for thrift        

I made sure that wheel is installed when doing requirements.txt installation:

Collecting wheel (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))                                                                                                                                                                              
Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/00/83/b4a77d044e78ad1a45610eb88f745be2fd2c6d658f9798a15e384b7d57c9/wheel-0.33.6-py2.py3-none-any.

But if I install it separately

python -m pip install wheel
python -m pip install -r requirements

it works fine and the python -m pip -r requirements finishes with no error messages.

So isn't it possible to put wheel installation into requirements.txt? What is the proper way to deal with it when installing into venv? To install it before requirements.txt installation?

Answer 1

I believe this happens with older versions of pip. For example in my quick tests it happens with pip 9.0.1 which is delivered by default with Python 3.6's ensurepip standard library, but doesn't happen once pip is updated to 19.2.3 which as far as I know should be bundled with Python 3.8. You seem to be using Python 3.8 so I'm confused by the fact that you encounter this error. Anyway this error, shouldn't effectively block the actual installation of the requirements.

If possible I'd recommend updating pip:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

before installing the requirements:

python -m pip install --requirement requirements.txt

Installing wheel (or updating pip) from within the requirements file is not useful in this case.