installing Reportlab (error: command 'gcc'

Question

I'm trying to install ReportLab 2.4 on a 10.04.2 server with virtualenv. In the ReportLab_2_4 folder I use:

python setup.py install

and the error I get:

error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

Answer 1

As Skimantas said, I think you should install python-dev. sudo apt-get install python-dev and I was able to install reportlab into my home directory with command "pip install reportlab" without sudo as mentioned earlier answer. I need only root access to install python-dev.

Shortly..

I installed virtualenv

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages virtual01

I installed

sudo apt-get install python-dev

I activate my virtual environment just to be sure...

source  ~/virtual01/bin/activate

cd ~/virtual01/bin
pip install reportlab

And that's it.

(I just recorded what I did in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

Answer 2

I got a very similar error trying to install Reportlab on Mac OS X, which I'd recently upgraded to 10.9. Run Xcode, agree the the new license agreement, and try again.

Answer 3

On the outside chance anyone is deploying reportlab to AWS EC2 / ElasticBeanstalk...My solution is below.

deactivate && sudo pip install reportlab
sudo cp -r /usr/local/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/reportlab /opt/python/run/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/

It's super hacky, but it's a workaround to get it running on my django stack with AWS ElasticBeanstalk. I just just modified .ebextensions/02_python.config to execute the above before continuing further, i think it is set to execute 2nd, after using pip to install requirements.txt to the venv.