poetry: getting error while running poetry show

I guess this is a duplicate of #7957, just revealing itself in a different way. In both cases the result is that poetry is calling python instead of calling a particular python in a particular virtual environment

• on some systems that just fails outright because there is no such binary (#7957)
• on others it finds the wrong python, a python27, and that goes wrong (this issue)

so it is fixed by the same fix

Edit: or anyway that’s probably true for the virtualenvs.in-project variation per previous comment, I guess it can’t be the case though for pre-1.5.0 examples

For what it’s worth, I have the same issue, on a MacOS where default system python is 2.7 but I installed poetry using python3 which is version 3.10. The installation of poetry should ensure it sticks with the same python3?

Just did a bit of poking around because I hate feeling like I’m bonkers, it seems that I’m not the first person to end up with virtual environments that have a usr/local/bin instead of a bin dir, including one in a Poetry issue. I’m going to conclude that something was fishy in my Python installation and that something in the course of installing the official Python .pkg distribution over my brew install, then cleaning up, then re-installing the brew version got everything facing in the proper direction.

If you anyone else ends up here, these might be useful:

• https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/5925
• https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/2319
• https://github.com/nanoporetech/katuali/issues/10
• https://github.com/pypa/build/issues/215
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/1406304/virtualenv-installs-envs-into-local-bin-instead-of-bin

Ok, this is now a non-problem, though I don’t know why.

I took @dimbleby’s suggestion, set a break point, walked into the code, and found the really weird result that the virtual environment didn’t have a bin dir, but rather a usr with a local with a bin dir (see below). Fortunately I cut/paste the bits included below, so I’m not crazy, but… I cleaned up (rm -rf /Users/georgehartzell/Library/Caches/pypoetry/) and tried to recreate it and…

Now everything works (starting from an uninstall and install of poetry v 1.5.0) and I can not get it to fail. While working along this today I installed the official Python .pkg file version of Python 3.11, uninstalled it using pkgutil and rm, and reinstalled via homebrew. Perhaps that changed something? Also had been playing with older versions of poetry, but can’t recreate it that way either.

There are enough screen copies in this and the #8012 thread that I don’t think I was hallucinating, but I can no longer recreate this.

If it happens again or I figure out what I changed, I’ll pick the thread back up.

@dimbleby – thank you for the pointers!

For posterity’s sake, here’s what I saw the first time I walked into the code.

---

Well, weird.

(Pdb) p bin_dir
PosixPath('/Users/georgehartzell/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/foo-XlONOBww-py3.11/bin')
(Pdb) p python_executables
[]

but

$ ls /Users/georgehartzell/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/foo-XlONOBww-py3.11/
lib        pyvenv.cfg usr
$

and

$ ls /Users/georgehartzell/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/foo-XlONOBww-py3.11/usr/local/bin
activate         activate.fish    activate.ps1     pip              pip3             python           python3.11       wheel-3.11       wheel3.11
activate.csh     activate.nu      activate_this.py pip-3.11         pip3.11          python3          wheel            wheel3
$

Just discovered a new clue. I created a test user from scratch, and as that user repeated the installation above. curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3.10

I then created a test directory and ran poetry init inside, creating a simple pyproject.toml. Followed that with poetry update and it worked – it created the virtualenv and lock file.

However, I had forgotten that Poetry defaults to creating virtualenvs under ~/.cache, and I vastly prefer them in-project. So I clean up and try again:

poetry env remove 3.10 poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true poetry update

And now it fails, with ‘Unknown option: -I’.

So what ended up working for me is erasing every trace of poetry from my system. First through the usual channels:

python3 -m pip uninstall poetry
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 - --uninstall

Then using mlocate trace what was left of poetry in the system:

sudo updatedb
locate poetry

What I ended up removing was:

rm -r /home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/poetry*
rm -r /home/ubuntu/.config/pypoetry
rm -r /home/ubuntu/.cache/pypoetry
rm /home/ubuntu/.local/bin/poetry

Then I could reinstall poetry. This time I opted for installing poetry using pip and python 3.9, which is more stable in my system (the collections.abc renaming is pulling my leg time and again):

pip3.9 install --user poetry