How can I troubleshoot Python Could not find platform independent libraries prefix

Question

I m trying to use Fontcustom to create an icon font using svg files and fontforge  I m on OSX 7  However  whenever I run the program I get the error  Could not find platform independent libraries  lt prefix gt  Could not find platform dependent libraries  lt exec prefix gt  Consider setting  PYTHONHOME to  lt prefix gt    lt exec prefix gt   ImportError  No module named site    As a Python Unix newbie I don t even know where to start trying to solve this  Can anyone offer any advice  What are  lt prefix gt  and  lt exec prefix gt  referring to   When I type python --version I get Python 2 7 1  And in the directory  System Library Frameworks Python framework Versions 2 7 lib python2 7  there is a big list of modules  and site py is definitely in that folder  How can I get my computer to find the modules

User · Answer

I had this problem and spent a few hours trying to fix it  I fixed the prefix error by changing the path but I still had an encoding import error  This was fixed by restarting my computer

User · Answer

If you made a virtual env  then deleted that python installation  you ll get the same error  Just rm -r your venv folder  then recreate it with a valid python location and do pip install -r requirements txt and you ll be all set  assuming you got your requirements txt right

User · Answer

My pycharm ce had the same error  was easy to fix it  if someone has that error  just uninstall and delete the folder  use ctrl h if you can t find the folder in your documents  install the software again and should work again   Remember to save the scratches folder before erasing the pycharm folder

User · Answer

change PYTHONHOME to the parent folder of the bin file of python  like  usr which is the parent folder of  usr bin

User · Answer

Try export PYTHONHOME  usr local   Python should be installed in  usr local on OS X   This answer has received a little more attention than I anticipated  I ll add a little bit more context   Normally  Python looks for its libraries in the paths prefix lib and exec prefix lib  where prefix and exec prefix are configuration options   If the PYTHONHOME environment variable is set  then the value of prefix and exec prefix are inherited from it  If the PYTHONHOME environment variable is not set  then prefix and exec prefix default to  usr local  and I believe there are other ways to set prefix exec prefix as well  but I m not totally familiar with them    Normally  when you receive the error message Could not find platform independent libraries  lt prefix gt   the string  lt prefix gt  would be replaced with the actual value of prefix   However  if prefix has an empty value  then you get the rather cryptic messages posted in the question  One way to get an empty prefix would be to set PYTHONHOME to an empty string   More info about PYTHONHOME  prefix  and exec prefix is available in the official docs

User · Answer

I had this issue while using Python installed with sudo make altinstall on Opensuse linux  It seems that the compiled libraries are installed in  usr local lib64 but Python is looking for them in  usr local lib   I solved it by creating a dynamic link to the relevant directory in  usr local lib  sudo ln -s  usr local lib64 python3 8 lib-dynload   usr local lib python3 8 lib-dynload     I suspect the better thing to do would be to specify libdir as an argument to configure  at the start of the build process  but I haven t tested it that way

[python] How can I troubleshoot Python "Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>"

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