pip connection failure: cannot fetch index base URL http://pypi.python.org/simple/

Question

I run sudo pip install git-review, and get the following messages:

Downloading/unpacking git-review
  C         


        

Answer 1

I got this error message in ~/.pip/pip.log

Could not fetch URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/: connection error: [Errno 185090050] _ssl.c:344: error:0B084002:x509 certificate routines:X509_load_cert_crl_file:system lib
  Will skip URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/ when looking for download links for regulargrid

I fixed it by updating my ~/.pip/pip.conf. It accidentally pointed to cacert.pem file that did not exist and looked like this

[global]
cert = /some/path/.pip/cacert.pem

Answer 2

If you're running these commands in a Docker container on Windows, it may mean that your docker machine's network connection is stale and needs to be rebuilt. To fix it, run these commands:

docker-machine stop
docker-machine start
@FOR /f "tokens=*" %i IN ('docker-machine env') DO @%i

Answer 3

You need to upgrade your pip installation.

The --index-url (short version: -i) option allows you to specify an index-url in the call to pip itself, there you can use the https-variant. Then you can instruct pip to upgrade itself.

sudo pip install --index-url https://pypi.python.org/simple/ --upgrade pip

Afterwards you should be able to use pip without the --index-url option.

---

I believe that the release 7.0.0 (2015-05-21) triggered this issue. The release note for that version states the following:

BACKWARD INCOMPATIBLE No longer implicitly support an insecure origin origin, and instead require insecure origins be explicitly trusted with the --trusted-host option.

You can check your pip version with pip --version.

This would mean that issuing sudo pip install --trusted-host --upgrade pip once would also solve this issue, albeit download pip over insecure http. This might also not work at all, because it is possible that the insecure endpoint is no longer accessible on the server (I have not tested this).

Answer 4

I know this is an old thread, but I encountered this issue today and wanted to share my solution to the problem because I haven't seen this solution elsewhere on SO.

My environment: Python 2.7.12/2.7.14 on Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS in a virtualenv, pip version 1.1.

My Errors:

pip install nose

in console:

Cannot fetch index base URL http://pypi.python.org/simple/

in ~/.pip/pip.log:

Could not fetch URL http://pypi.python.org/simple/: HTTP Error 403: SSL is required

Curious for me because I had been running these same commands in a script without issue for about a year.

this fixed it:

pip install --index-url=https://pypi.python.org/simple/ nose

(note the https)

Hope this helps someone!

Answer 5

I had the same problem with pip==1.5.6. I had to correct my system time.

# date -s "2014-12-09 10:09:50"

Answer 6

I had the same issue with pip 1.5.6.

I just deleted the ~/.pip folder and it worked like a charm.

rm -r ~/.pip/