Not able to install Python packages [SSL: TLSV1_AL

Question

I am trying to install a Python library using pip, getting an SSL error:

~/projects/base  pre-master±  pip install xdict

Collecting xdict
  Could not fetch URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/xdict/: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: [SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] tlsv1 alert protocol version (_ssl.c:590) - skipping
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement xdict (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for xdict

pip version: pip 9.0.1

How do I fix this error?

Answer 1

Following @Anupam's answer on OS X resulted in the following error for me, regardless of permissions I ran it with:

Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: ...

What eventually worked was to download a newer pip package (9.0.3) from PyPI directly from my browser - https://pypi.org/simple/pip/, extract the contents, and then pip install the package locally:

pip install ./pip-9.0.3/

This fixed my [SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] errors.