How can I install GRPCIO on an Apple M1 Silicon laptop?

Question

Every time I try to install a pip package with GRPCIO as a dependency inside a .direnv project I get a build failure due to my architecture being arm64. How can I work around this while waiting for the GRPCIO crew to release an update?

  Using cached grpcio-1.34.0.tar.gz (21.0 MB)
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
     command: /Users/yoav/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/orca-g6p4a6cZ-py3.8/bin/python -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/private/var/folders/jj/r3j0p91s2qgdpcpf5ptqr9qm0000gn/T/pip-install-n05vw0u0/grpcio_103d947f24954cde8b8a019b4c9f88fe/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/private/var/folders/jj/r3j0p91s2qgdpcpf5ptqr9qm0000gn/T/pip-install-n05vw0u0/grpcio_103d947f24954cde8b8a019b4c9f88fe/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /private/var/folders/jj/r3j0p91s2qgdpcpf5ptqr9qm0000gn/T/pip-pip-egg-info-z41yqiw6
         cwd: /private/var/folders/jj/r3j0p91s2qgdpcpf5ptqr9qm0000gn/T/pip-install-n05vw0u0/grpcio_103d947f24954cde8b8a019b4c9f88fe/
    Complete output (10 lines):
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/private/var/folders/jj/r3j0p91s2qgdpcpf5ptqr9qm0000gn/T/pip-install-n05vw0u0/grpcio_103d947f24954cde8b8a019b4c9f88fe/setup.py", line 359, in <module>
        if mac_target and (pkg_resources.parse_version(mac_target) <
      File "/Users/yoav/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/orca-g6p4a6cZ-py3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 113, in parse_version
        return packaging.version.Version(v)
      File "/Users/yoav/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs/orca-g6p4a6cZ-py3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pkg_resources/_vendor/packaging/version.py", line 275, in __init__
        match = self._regex.search(version)
    TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object
    ASM Builds for BoringSSL currently not supported on: macosx-11-arm64
    ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

Answer 1

This seems to work well, do the following in the terminal

export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1

And then install whatever package that you wanted to install, in my case I was trying to install firebase admin and I had to run the following

pip install firebase-admin

Or just run the below command if you just want to install grpcio

pip install grpcio

I found this thread helpful to understand this issue in detail https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/25082