Pip install not functioning on windows 7 Cygwin in

Question

I'm having a terrible time of getting pip up and running on Cygwin which I just recently installed on my Windows 7 Computer. I am writing in the hope that anyone out there can tell me what I am doing incorrectly in terms of getting these packages installed correctly.

To start, I followed the instructions on this site:

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html

with setuptools installed prior to pip installation. I followed the steps, ran this command:

Ryan@Albert ~
$ python get-pip.py

got this output:

Downloading/unpacking pip
Downloading pip-1.5.tar.gz (898kB): 898kB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package pip

    warning: no files found matching 'pip/cacert.pem'
    warning: no files found matching '*.html' under directory 'docs'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.rst' found under direct
    no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
Installing collected packages: pip
  Running setup.py install for pip

    warning: no files found matching 'pip/cacert.pem'
    warning: no files found matching '*.html' under directory 'docs'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.rst' found under direct
    no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
    Installing pip script to /usr/bin
    Installing pip2.7 script to /usr/bin
    Installing pip2 script to /usr/bin
Successfully installed pip
Cleaning up...

and lo and behold, ran pip with this command:

Ryan@Albert ~
$ pip install --upgrade setuptools

which led to absolutely no output. A blank line appeared underneath for 3-4 seconds and then the input prompt came up again without pip actually doing anything. I did a bunch more testing to confirm that there was something called pip on my machine but anytime it ran, it essentially did nothing. It did not download or install any programs.

I went about trying to install pip another way after uninstalling the first version. This time I tried:

$ easy_install pip

And got the following output:

Searching for pip
Best match: pip 1.5
Adding pip 1.5 to easy-install.pth file
Installing pip script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2.7 script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2 script to /usr/bin

Using /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Processing dependencies for pip
Finished processing dependencies for pip

Again, tried using pip to install virtualenv using this command:

$ pip install virtualenv

and it paused for 3-4 seconds, then made the command prompt available again. Exactly like the previous time. When I checked to see whether virtualenv was installed, it was not.

Essentially I have tried and tried to get pip up and running on my windows 7 Cygwin install but to no avail. I am aware of the fact that I can use other packages to install plugins and so forth but I would really appreciate it if someone had any knowledge on why this was happening so it doesn't plague me when I try to install stuff further on down the line.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

There is a work around for this problem: you can pipe the output to another process or to redirect it to file.

For example:

pip | more

Usage:
  pip <command> [options]

Commands:
  install                     Install packages.
  uninstall                   Uninstall packages.
  freeze                      Output installed packages in requirements format.
  list                        List installed packages.
  show                        Show information about installed packages.
  search                      Search PyPI for packages.
  wheel                       Build wheels from your requirements.
  help                        Show help for commands.

This will allow seeing stdout, but not stderr. In order to see stderr it also should be redirected:

pip 2>&1 | more

Answer 2

There's a bug(?) in 64-bit Cygwin which causes ctypes.util to segfault when trying to find libuuid (/usr/bin/cyguuid-1.dll). The fix is to install libuuid-devel from Cygwin setup. I found this from an issue filed against requests.py, but it's noted (and worked around in different ways) in a few other places, too.

Answer 3

Came across the same problem. Installation of binutils cygwin package solved it for me.