Installing psycopg2 fails on MacOS with unclear error message

Question

Trying to install psycopg2 using pip 19.1 on MacOS 10.14.4 returns the lengthy error message below. I understand there are warnings related to gcc, but given the actual error me

Answer 1

I had this problem running pip install psycopg2 while I was running OSX 10.14.4. I fixed it by:

1. Running pg_config and noticed the variable:

   CPPFLAGS = -I/usr/local/Cellar/icu4c/63.1/include -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk -I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include -I/usr/local/opt/readline/include -I/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk/usr/include/libxml2
   

   However /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk did not exist on my machine.

   So I changed it to /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk

2. I ran these two commands:

   export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/Cellar/icu4c/63.1/include -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.sdk -I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include -I/usr/local/opt/readline/include -I/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk/usr/include/libxml2"
   
   pip install psycopg2