cairocffi: Document installation for OSX (cannot import name constants)

I am trying to install Graphite. I am stuck upon cairo installation. I came across “http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11491268/install-pycairo-in-virtualenv”. I have installed cairocffi in my virtual environment.

My environment is: “OS X: 10.8.5 Python: 2.7.2 Virtual Env: pip list cairocffi (0.5.1) ceres (0.10.0) cffi (0.8.1) Django (1.5.5) django-tagging (0.3.1) pip (1.5) pycparser (2.10) setuptools (2.0.2) Twisted (11.1.0) txAMQP (0.6.2) whisper (0.9.12) wsgiref (0.1.2) zope.interface (4.0.5)”

Cairo: I have installed cairo using macports. “cairo @1.12.16_2+x11 (active)”

I started graphite with following sequence of commands:

source /opt/graphite/bin/activate
sudo /opt/graphite/bin/carbon-cache.py start
sudo ./bin/run-graphite-devel-server.py /opt/graphite

http://0.0.0.0:8080/ is displaying Graphite home page. But http://0.0.0.0:8080/render produces following traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 103, in get_response
    resolver_match = resolver.resolve(request.path_info)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 321, in resolve
    sub_match = pattern.resolve(new_path)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 321, in resolve
    sub_match = pattern.resolve(new_path)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 223, in resolve
    return ResolverMatch(self.callback, args, kwargs, self.name)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 230, in callback
    self._callback = get_callable(self._callback_str)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/utils/functional.py", line 31, in wrapper
    result = func(*args)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 97, in get_callable
    mod = import_module(mod_name)
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/utils/importlib.py", line 35, in import_module
    __import__(name)
  File "/opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/render/views.py", line 36, in <module>
    from graphite.render.evaluator import evaluateTarget
  File "/opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/render/evaluator.py", line 47, in <module>
    from graphite.render.functions import SeriesFunctions
  File "/opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/render/functions.py", line 33, in <module>
    from graphite.render.glyph import format_units
  File "/opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/render/glyph.py", line 15, in <module>
    import cairocffi as cairo
  File "/opt/graphite/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cairocffi/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from . import constants
ImportError: cannot import name constants

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 10 years ago
Comments: 39 (15 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I don’t know why, but apt-get install python-cairo-dev fixed my issue (same as OP)

cdosborn on Apr 22, 2015

Thanks for the answer all above, I met this problem yesterday. By reading your answers, it solved by "brew install cairo"finnally lol

bierxiaobia on Aug 25, 2016

In the version of cairocffi that I got from pip, the code in init.py never uses any of the cairo constants defined in constants.py directly, instead it uses

constants.NAME_OF_THE_CONSTANT

This can work if the module itself has been imported in the current namespace under the name constants, as is the case with:

import constants

but it cannot work if the constants contained in the module have been imported in the current namespace directly as is the case with:

from constants import *

Thomas-Schatz on Apr 19, 2014

I installed cairocffi from pip on MacOS 10.6.8, using a python-anaconda distribution and got the same error as the original poster:

import cairocffi
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/Users/thomas/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cairocffi/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
from . import constants
ImportError: cannot import name constants

Changing

from . import constants

import constants

in the init.py of cairocffi fixed the issue for me.

Thomas-Schatz on Apr 18, 2014