IPython import failure and python sys.path in general

Question

I\'m following this post to make one ipython rule all the virtualenvs.

From what I understand, the main idea of the post is that when in a virtualenv, ipython can no

Answer 1

IPython seems to work now!

Because ipython can not find simplegeneric. I tried to locate simplegeneric and found simplegeneric is in '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7'. After '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7' being added, ipython works fine.

Jeff Tratner's comment really helps!

Answer 2

Similar traceback I experienced with python 3.5.4 and pip 10.0.1 after installing ipython successfully.

line 32, in <module>
from .debugger import TerminalPdb, Pdb
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/IPython/terminal/debugger.py", line 6, in <module>
    from IPython.core.completer import IPCompleter
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/IPython/core/completer.py", line 137, in <module>
    from IPython.utils import generics
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/IPython/utils/generics.py", line 8, in <module>
from simplegeneric import generic
ImportError: No module named 'simplegeneric'

updating or installing the simplegeneric i.e sudo pip install simplegeneric --upgrade I get

Requirement already up-to-date: simplegeneric in /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages (0.8.1)

After some initial trial I searched on google/stackoverflow to see if anyone else faced similar problem and found this. And its @zjk answer that helps me to find solution.

Solutions: Found only egg folder in the python3.5 installed package dir. So I removed them and fresh install the simplegeneric.

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/simplegeneric-0.8.1-py3.5.egg-info/
sudo pip install simplegeneric

after that ipython worked just like charm.

N.B: I install the package at the system level that's why sudo required.

Answer 3

Making changes to the path did not help in any way. However running ipython as a super user worked (although I'm not proud of it!)

sudo ipython

Answer 4

I had the same problem, in my case the cause of it was that the directory: /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages was not added to the path when the virtual environment was created (I would like to know why)

In my case the following in the terminal solved the problem:

workon 'your_environment_here'
add2virtualenv /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

Note: This assumes you are using virtualenvwrapper

Answer 5

I experienced some weirdness in a new ubuntu host, and realized I was getting different behaviors for mkvirtualenv on mac versus the ubuntu. I got past this difference with

'mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages mynewenv'

Answer 6

In my case, it was a package higher up in my customized Python path named "path" that was causing the ImportError from:

import IPython.external.path as path

See https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/3994