pip issue installing almost any library

Question

I have a difficult time using pip to install almost anything. I'm new to coding, so I thought maybe this is something I've been doing wrong and have opted out to easy_install to get most of what I needed done, which has generally worked. However, now I'm trying to download the nltk library, and neither is getting the job done.

I tried entering

sudo pip install nltk

but got the following response:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/pip run on Sat May  4 00:15:38 2013
Downloading/unpacking nltk

  Getting page https://pypi.python.org/simple/nltk/
  Could not fetch URL [need more reputation to post link]: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: <urlopen error [Errno 1] _ssl.c:504: error:0D0890A1:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_verify:unknown message digest algorithm>

  Will skip URL [need more reputation to post link]/simple/nltk/ when looking for download links for nltk

  Getting page [need more reputation to post link]/simple/
  Could not fetch URL https://pypi.python. org/simple/: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: <urlopen error [Errno 1] _ssl.c:504: error:0D0890A1:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_verify:unknown message digest algorithm>

  Will skip URL [need more reputation to post link] when looking for download links for nltk

  Cannot fetch index base URL [need more reputation to post link]

  URLs to search for versions for nltk:
  * [need more reputation to post link]
  Getting page [need more reputation to post link]
  Could not fetch URL [need more reputation to post link]: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: <urlopen error [Errno 1] _ssl.c:504: error:0D0890A1:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_verify:unknown message digest algorithm>

  Will skip URL [need more reputation to post link] when looking for download links for nltk

  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement nltk

No distributions at all found for nltk

Exception information:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.3.1-py2.7.egg/pip/basecommand.py", line 139, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.3.1-py2.7.egg/pip/commands/install.py", line 266, in run
    requirement_set.prepare_files(finder, force_root_egg_info=self.bundle, bundle=self.bundle)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.3.1-py2.7.egg/pip/req.py", line 1026, in prepare_files
    url = finder.find_requirement(req_to_install, upgrade=self.upgrade)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.3.1-py2.7.egg/pip/index.py", line 171, in find_requirement
    raise DistributionNotFound('No distributions at all found for %s' % req)
DistributionNotFound: No distributions at all found for nltk

--easy_install installed fragments of the library and the code ran into trouble very quickly upon trying to run it.

Any thoughts on this issue? I'd really appreciate some feedback on how I can either get pip working or something to get around the issue in the meantime.

Answer 1

This video tutorial worked for me:

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

Answer 2

Another cause of SSL errors can be a bad system time – certificates won't validate if it's too far off from the present.

Answer 3

I solved a similar problem by adding the --trusted-host pypi.python.org option

Answer 4

The only solution that worked for me is:

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

Answer 5

For me, the latest pip (1.5.6) works fine with the insecure nltk package if you just tell it not to be so picky about security:

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall --allow-all-external --allow-unverified ntlk nltk

Answer 6

Pypi removed support for TLS versions less than 1.2

You need to re-install Pip, do

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

or for global Python:

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