What is the meaning of Failed building wheel for X in pip install

Question

This is a truly popular question here at SO  but none of the many answers I have looked at  clearly explain what this error really mean  and why it occurs    One source of confusion  is that when  for example  you do pip install pycparser  you first get the error   Failed building wheel for pycparser  which is then followed by the message that the package was    Successfully installed pycparser-2 19       pip3 install pycparser  Collecting pycparser   Using cached https   files pythonhosted org packages 68 9e 49196946aee219aead1290e00d1e7fdeab8567783e83e1b9ab5585e6206a pycparser-2 19 tar gz Building wheels for collected packages  pycparser   Running setup py bdist wheel for pycparser     error   Complete output from command  usr bin python3 -u -c  import setuptools  tokenize   file     tmp pip-install-g v28hpp pycparser setup py  f getattr tokenize   open   open    file    code f read   replace   r n     n   f close   exec compile code    file     exec     bdist wheel -d  tmp pip-wheel-  w f6p0 --python-tag cp36    Traceback  most recent call last       File   lt string gt    line 1  in  lt module gt              File   usr lib python3 6 site-packages pkg resources   init   py   line 2349  in resolve       module     import   self module name  fromlist     name      level 0    ModuleNotFoundError  No module named  wheel bdist wheel     ----------------------------------------   Failed building wheel for pycparser   Running setup py clean for pycparser Failed to build pycparser Installing collected packages  pycparser   Running setup py install for pycparser     done Successfully installed pycparser-2 19   What is going on here    I would like to understand how something can fail but still get installed and whether you can trust this package functioning correctly    So far the best partial explanation I have found is this

User · Answer

Yesterday  I got the same error   Failed building wheel for hddfancontrol when I ran pip3 install hddfancontrol  The result was Failed to build hddfancontrol  The cause was error  invalid command  bdist wheel  and Running setup py bdist wheel for hddfancontrol     error  The error was fixed by running the following    pip3 install wheel    From here    Alternatively  the  wheel  can be downloaded directly from here  When downloaded  it can be installed by running the following   pip3 install   the file path to wheel-0 32 3-py2 py3-none-any whl

User · Answer

In my case  update the pip versi  n after create the venv  this update pip from  9 0 1 to 20 3 1 python3 -m venv env python source env python bin activate pip3 install pip --upgrade  But  the message was    Using legacy  setup py install  for django-avatar  since package  wheel  is not installed   Then  I install wheel package after update pip python3 -m venv env python source env python bin activate pip3 install --upgrade pip pip3 install wheel  And the message was    Building wheel for django-avatar  setup py   started default    Building wheel for django-avatar  setup py   finished with status  done

User · Answer

pip maintainer here    If the package is not a wheel  pip tries to build a wheel for it  via setup py bdist wheel   If that fails for any reason  you get the  Failed building wheel for pycparser  message and pip falls back to installing directly  via setup py install    Once we have a wheel  pip can install the wheel by unpacking it correctly  pip tries to install packages via wheels as often as it can  This is because of various advantages of using wheels  like faster installs  cache-able  not executing code again etc      Your error message here is due to the wheel package being missing  which contains the logic required to build the wheels in setup py bdist wheel   pip install wheel can fix that      The above is the legacy behavior that is currently the default  we ll switch to PEP 517 by default  sometime in the future  moving us to a standards-based process for this  We also have isolated builds for that so  you d have wheel installed in those environments by default       PEP 517  A build-system independent format for source trees A blog post on  PEP 517 and 518 in Plain English

User · Answer

I would like to add that if you only have Python3 on your system then you need to start using pip3 instead of pip  You can install pip3 using the following command  sudo apt install python3-pip -y  After this you can try to install the package you need with  sudo pip3 install  lt package gt

User · Answer

On Ubuntu 18 04  I ran into this issue because the apt package for wheel does not include the wheel command  I think pip tries to import the wheel python package  and if that succeeds assumes that the wheel command is also available  Ubuntu breaks that assumption    The apt python3 code package is named python3-wheel  This is installed automatically because python3-pip recommends it   The apt python3 wheel command package is named python-wheel-common  Installing this too fixes the  failed building wheel  errors for me

User · Answer

I got the same message when I tried to install pip install django-imagekit  So I ran pip install wheel  I had python 2 7  and then I reran pip install django-imagekit and it worked  Thanks

User · Answer

This may Help you         Uninstalling pycparser   pip uninstall pycparser  Reinstall pycparser   pip install pycparser  I got same error while installing termcolor and I fixed it by reinstalling it

User · Answer

I had the same problem while installing Brotli ERROR Failed building wheel for Brotli  I solved it by downloading the  whl file from here and installing it using the below command C  Users  user name  Downloads gt pip install Brotli-1 0 9-cp39-cp39-win amd64 whl

User · Answer

Error   System   aws ec2 instance  t2 small  issue   while installing opencv python via pip3 install opencv-python   Problem with the CMake installation  aborting build  CMake executable is cmake      ----------------------------------------   Failed building wheel for opencv-python   Running setup py clean for opencv-python   What worked for me pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel After this you still might received fallowing error error     from  cv2 import   ImportError  libGL so 1  cannot open shared object file  No such file or directory  Installing libgl solved the error for me  sudo apt update sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-glx  Hope this helps

User · Answer

Since  nobody seem to mention this apart myself  My own solution to the above problem is most often to make sure to disable the cached copy by using  pip install  lt package gt  --no-cache-dir

User · Answer

Try this   sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev libpq-dev  It has worked for me when I have installed these two   See the link here for more information

User · Answer

It might be helpful to address this question from a package deployment perspective   There are many tutorials out there that explain how to publish a package to PyPi  Below are a couple I have used    medium real python  My experience is that most of these tutorials only have you use the  tar of the source  not a wheel  Thus  when installing packages created using these tutorials  I ve received the  Failed to build wheel  error    I later found the link on PyPi to the Python Software Foundation s docs PSF Docs  I discovered that their setup and build process is slightly different  and does indeed included building a wheel file    After using the officially documented method  I no longer received the error when installing my packages    So  the error might simply be a matter of how the developer packaged and deployed the project  None of us were born knowing how to use PyPi  and if they happened upon the wrong tutorial -- well  you can fill in the blanks    I m sure that is not the only reason for the error  but I m willing to bet that is a major reason for it

[python] What is the meaning of "Failed building wheel for X" in pip install?

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