lektor: Ubuntu 20.04 "error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'"

I followed the procedure on Lektor’s webpage, and despite having installed all prerequisites, I get the following errors:

Building wheel for inifile (setup.py) ... error
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /usr/local/lib/lektor/bin/python3 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/inifile/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/inifile/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' bdist_wheel -d /tmp/pip-wheel-ayl9hhi2
       cwd: /tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/inifile/
  Complete output (6 lines):
  usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
     or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
     or: setup.py --help-commands
     or: setup.py cmd --help

  error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'
  ----------------------------------------
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for inifile
  Running setup.py clean for inifile
  Building wheel for EXIFRead (setup.py) ... error
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /usr/local/lib/lektor/bin/python3 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/EXIFRead/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/EXIFRead/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' bdist_wheel -d /tmp/pip-wheel-mxtpmzko
       cwd: /tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/EXIFRead/
  Complete output (7 lines):
  Warning: 'classifiers' should be a list, got type 'tuple'
  usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
     or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
     or: setup.py --help-commands
     or: setup.py cmd --help

  error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'
  ----------------------------------------
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for EXIFRead
  Running setup.py clean for EXIFRead
  Building wheel for watchdog (setup.py) ... error
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /usr/local/lib/lektor/bin/python3 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/watchdog/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/watchdog/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' bdist_wheel -d /tmp/pip-wheel-5pxag3tc
       cwd: /tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/watchdog/
  Complete output (6 lines):
  usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
     or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
     or: setup.py --help-commands
     or: setup.py cmd --help

  error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'
  ----------------------------------------
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for watchdog
  Running setup.py clean for watchdog
  Building wheel for pathtools (setup.py) ... error
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /usr/local/lib/lektor/bin/python3 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/pathtools/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/pathtools/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' bdist_wheel -d /tmp/pip-wheel-xurhnhnp
       cwd: /tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/pathtools/
  Complete output (8 lines):
  /tmp/pip-install-af6y5v9m/pathtools/setup.py:25: DeprecationWarning: the imp module is deprecated in favour of importlib; see the module's documentation for alternative uses
    import imp
  usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
     or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
     or: setup.py --help-commands
     or: setup.py cmd --help

  error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'
  ----------------------------------------
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for pathtools

Any sugestions? It installed without issue in windows, so I suppose it is something related to Ubuntu 20.04.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 4 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 18 (11 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@xlotlu Sorry, solved it as mentioned, however I need practice at the vps instance, I’ll reset and proceed again. I’ll be back with results in about 4 hours (currently busy)

andoresuperesu on Jun 1, 2020

I’m updating this topic to point that the best install method at the moment is using pipx:

$ python3 -m pip install --user pipx
$ python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Close and reopen terminal

$ pipx install lektor

I’ll close this issue with this and point out 3 things, 2 and 3 are derived from 1:

First, the install script should be set aside to prioritize pipx.
Second, since pipx won’t do system-wide, we have to determine wether that’s important.
Third, since pipx only workd on 3.6+ we should decide whether all previous version are deprecated.

For further discussion please go to #915

andoresuperesu on Aug 24, 2021

Update: --prefer-binary won’t do anything, there are no binaries to get.

This seems to me entirely very silly. The issue here is that those packages don’t have wheels pre-built for py3 (see https://pypi.org/simple/exifread/ , https://pypi.org/simple/inifile/ etc.) and that pip tries to build a wheel locally, regardless. And funnily enough, there is in fact no issue, since everything just works.

I personally consider this a pip bug, but I’m not willing to pursue that stance. 😃 This issue here seems repeated for many projects, and consistently people propose pip install wheel, and nobody bothers to ask “but why?”.

We could update setuptools and install the wheel package in one go pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel?

Well, “there’s nothing to fix” but it saves us some tilting at windmills, so ok.

xlotlu on Jun 8, 2020