How to upgrade disutils package PyYAML?

pip pyyaml
sphoenix picture sphoenix · Apr 19, 2018 · Viewed 86.9k times · Source

I was trying to install chatterbot which has a dependency on PyYAML=3.12. In my Ubuntu machine installed PyYAML version is 3.11. So I used the following command to upgrade PyYAML:

sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade PyYAML

But it gives the following error:

Cannot uninstall 'PyYAML'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.

My pip3 version is 10.0.0.

How to resolve this?

Answer

Fenhl picture Fenhl · Nov 29, 2018

Try using the --ignore-installed flag:

sudo -H pip3 install --ignore-installed PyYAML

This works because to upgrade a package, pip first uninstalls the old version, then installs the new version. It is the uninstall step that fails for distutils packages. With the --ignore-installed flag, the uninstall step is skipped and the new version is simply installed on top of the old one.

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