ImportError: No module named 'thread'

Question

when I run mitmproxy command in command line, I get the following error.

% mitmproxy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/mitmproxy", line 7, in <module>
    from libmproxy.main import mitmproxy
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/libmproxy/main.py", line 5, in <module>
    import thread
ImportError: No module named 'thread'

I googled this error and found this stackoverflow Q&A page.

pydev importerror: no module named thread, debugging no longer works after pydev upgrade

according to the page above, the error occurs because module "thread" is renamed to "_thread" in python3.

So, I know what's causing this error, but then what?

I don't know what to do now in order to get rid of this error.

I'm new to python. I've just installed Python and pip into my mac OSX as shown below because I want to use mitmproxy.

% which pip
/usr/local/bin/pip
% pip --version
pip 8.1.1 from /usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages (python 3.5)

% which python
/usr/bin/python
% which python3
/usr/local/bin/python3

% python --version
Python 2.7.10
% python3 --version
Python 3.5.1

could anyone please tell me what to do now?

Additional Info

As @linusg answered, I created "thread.py" file in "site-packages" directory and pasted the code below in "thread.py"

from _thread import *
__all__ = ("error", "LockType", "start_new_thread", "interrupt_main", "exit", "allocate_lock", "get_ident", "stack_size", "acquire", "release", "locked")

After I did this, "ImportError: No module named 'thread'" disappeared, but now I have another ImportError, which is "import Cookie ImportError: No module named 'Cookie'".

It seems that in Python 3, Cookie module is renamed to http.cookies (stackoverflow.com/questions/3522029/django-mod-python-error).

Now what am I supposed to do?

What I have in "site-packages" directory

% ls /usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages                                                  (git)-[master]
ConfigArgParse-0.10.0.dist-info/                mitmproxy-0.15.dist-info/
OpenSSL/                                        netlib/
PIL/                                            netlib-0.15.1.dist-info/
Pillow-3.0.0.dist-info/                         passlib/
PyYAML-3.11.dist-info/                          passlib-1.6.5.dist-info/
__pycache__/                                    pathtools/
_cffi_backend.cpython-35m-darwin.so*            pathtools-0.1.2.dist-info/
_markerlib/                                     pip/
_watchdog_fsevents.cpython-35m-darwin.so*       pip-8.1.1.dist-info/
argh/                                           pkg_resources/
argh-0.26.1.dist-info/                          pyOpenSSL-0.15.1.dist-info/
backports/                                      pyasn1/
backports.ssl_match_hostname-3.5.0.1.dist-info/ pyasn1-0.1.9.dist-info/
blinker/                                        pycparser/
blinker-1.4.dist-info/                          pycparser-2.14.dist-info/
certifi/                                        pyparsing-2.0.7.dist-info/
certifi-2016.2.28.dist-info/                    pyparsing.py
cffi/                                           pyperclip/
cffi-1.6.0.dist-info/                           pyperclip-1.5.27.dist-info/
click/                                          setuptools/
click-6.2.dist-info/                            setuptools-19.4-py3.5.egg-info/
configargparse.py                               sitecustomize.py
construct/                                      six-1.10.0.dist-info/
construct-2.5.2.dist-info/                      six.py
cryptography/                                   test/
cryptography-1.1.2.dist-info/                   thread.py
easy_install.py                                 tornado/
hpack/                                          tornado-4.3.dist-info/
hpack-2.0.1.dist-info/                          urwid/
html2text/                                      urwid-1.3.1.dist-info/
html2text-2015.11.4.dist-info/                  watchdog/
idna/                                           watchdog-0.8.3.dist-info/
idna-2.1.dist-info/                             wheel/
libmproxy/                                      wheel-0.26.0-py3.5.egg-info/
lxml/                                           yaml/
lxml-3.4.4.dist-info/

Answer 1

Go to you site-packages folder, create a file called thread.py and paste this code in it:

from _thread import *
__all__ = ("error", "LockType", "start_new_thread", "interrupt_main", "exit", "allocate_lock", "get_ident", "stack_size", "acquire", "release", "locked")

This creates an 'alias' for the module _thread called thread. While the _thread module is very small, you can use dir() for bigger modules:

# Examle for the Cookies module which was renamed to http.cookies:
# Cookies.py in site-packages
import http.cookies
__all__ = tuple(dir(http.cookies))

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

You are trying to run Python 2 code on Python 3, which will not work.

As of April 2016, mitmproxy only supports Python 2.7. We're actively working to fix that in the next months, but for now you need to use Python 2 or the binaries provided at http://mitmproxy.org.

As of August 2016, the development version of mitmproxy now supports Python 3.5+. The next release (0.18) will be the first one including support for Python 3.5+.

As of January 2017, mitmproxy only supports Python 3.5+.

Answer 3

The name of the file saved could be threading, this would give an error as threading is a predefined class in Python. Try changing the name of your file. It would help....

Answer 4

Easiest solution is to create a virtualenv with python2 and run mitmproxy on this virtualenv

virtualenv -p `which python2` .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install mitmproxy
.env/bin/mitmproxy