Pip install error. Setuptools.command not found

Question

I'm using a clean instance of Ubuntu server and would like to install some python packages in my virtualenv.

I receive the following output from the command 'pip install -r requirements.txt'

Downloading/unpacking pymongo==2.5.2 (from -r requirements.txt (line 7))
  Downloading pymongo-2.5.2.tar.gz (303kB): 303kB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package pymongo
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 3, in <module>
    ImportError: No module named setuptools.command
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<string>", line 3, in <module>

ImportError: No module named setuptools.command

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...
Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /home/redacted/env/build/pymongo
Storing complete log in /home/redacted/.pip/pip.log

Any Idea what's going on?

python version 2.7.3

pip version pip 1.4 from /home/redacted/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages (python 2.7)

Answer 1

had the same problem, solved it with

pip install -U setuptools

Answer 2

Try installing:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

if this doesn't work try:

curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
python get-pip.py

Edit: If you have several (possible conflicting) python installations or environments, the following commands can be useful to debug which executables are being used:

which python
which pip
which easy_install

They should "match". It can happen for example that you have pip installing packages for an EPD or global distribution while the current python that is being used corresponds to a local environment (or something different), in which case it might not be able to see the installed packages.