IPython console can't locate “backports.shutil_get_terminal_size” and won't load

Question

I\'m running Python2.7 on windows 10 doing env and most pkg management with Anaconda. After upgrading a number of packages, my ipython console now fails to start in any IDE

Answer 1

Try this

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install backports.shutil_get_terminal_size

Answer 2

I am on CentOS 7, and I needed to change my terminal.py as shown below.

On the import statements I messed around with the prefixes and got it to work -

import os
import sys
import warnings
try:
  from backports import get_terminal_size as _get_terminal_size
except ImportError:
  # use backport on Python 2
  from shutil_backports import get_terminal_size as _get_terminal_size

Answer 3

Virtualenv can prove very useful in a case like this, and even more specifically, a virtualenv with no global site packages allowed. Rule out many causes just by doing a clean install in an isolated virtualenv.

In my experience IPython and its dependencies really want to be in the same site. If you have the backports package installed globally but IPython installed in the user roaming site, you might expect runtime import errors such as the ones described in the OP.

I realize that sometimes we need global site packages but the penalty is a more complicated site and dependency handling within pip/setuptools. Depending on several python configuration and windows environment conditions, your packages may be spread across global sites, user (roaming) sites, and virtualenv sites.

Rule out weird site problems by building and installing clean in a virtualenv with no access to global or user packages. The virtualenvwrapper and add2virtualenv command can be used to cleanly allow certain global packages.

Answer 4

The only thing which worked for me was to download the tarball from pypi and run python setup.py install

It worked like a charm

Answer 5

• Works for Anaconda Python version Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
• Edit the file and get rid the "try" and "except" import statements
• Add in the new import statement
• Update config parser => ./conda install configparser

• Install nbbrowserpdf => .pip install nbbrowserpdf

  vim +22 /home/alienone/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/utils/terminal.py

  from backports import shutil_get_terminal_size as _get_terminal_size

Answer 6

According to this thread this is due to a bug in conda which leads to a conflict with pip installs and can be solved with a force re-install. For the thread author, $ conda install --force ipython solved the issue, for me it was $ conda install --force backports.