pip/easy_install failure: failed to create process

Question

After following this article: How do I install pip on Windows? on my Windows system using Enthought Canopy 64 Bit system, I cannot get pip or easy_install to work due to error:

pip install requests
failed to create process

I tried re-installing setuptools, running cmd prompt as admin without any effect.

Answer 1

When I came across this problem, I found that my path contained multiple entries for Python. After tidying up my path so that it had an entry for the python installation folder and the scripts folder (in my case C:\Python27 and C:\Python27\Scripts), pip worked properly.

Answer 2

Please check out have you ever rename your python.exe I install python2 and python3 on my PC at the same time , so I rename my python.exe to python3.exe.And when I use pip ,it boom... After rename it back .It's ok again....

Answer 3

I had installed Anaconda and so I still had C:\Python27 along with C:\Anaconda in my path. When I removed C:\Python27 and all subfolders I was able to use pip again.

Answer 4

If you intentionally want to rename the folder where python.exe resides, you should also modify all python files in the Scripts folder. So a third solution would be to modify the python files as well: the first line in pip-2.7-script.py originally contain:

#!C:\OriginalPythonDir\python.exe

Modifying this path to the new Python folder fixes the problem.

(P.S. Unfortunately I cannot yet reply to answers, so I'll reply as a new answer because I thought it could be useful for other people as well).

Answer 5

Check whether the pip-script points out the exact location of python.exe, because pip always points (C:\python3.3\python.exe). In my system i've installed 2 versions of python i.e python2 & python3. I ve modified the home application of python.exe into python2.exe and python3.exe.

When i installed pip windows installer. it results me out with the error " failed to create process"

Answer 6

Just ran into this. Sort of. Pip worked for me, but after installing pytest-watch, running the ptw script was giving this error.

For some reason, pip stopped quoting the #! in ptw-script.py:

#!C:\Program Files (x86)\Python\python.exe

It worked after I added quotes manually:

#!"C:\Program Files (x86)\Python\python.exe"

I don't really know why this suddenly started happening. Adding this here in case anyone else coming here from Google runs into the same thing.

Here's a related pip issue (I think).