error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1 while installing eventlet

Question

I wanted to install eventlet on my system in order to have "Herd" for software deployment.. but the terminal is showing a gcc error:

  root@agrover-OptiPlex-780:~# easy_install -U eventlet
  Searching for eventlet
  Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/eventlet/
  Reading http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Eventlet
  Reading http://eventlet.net
   Best match: eventlet 0.9.16
    Processing eventlet-0.9.16-py2.7.egg
    eventlet 0.9.16 is already the active version in easy-install.pth

   Using /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/eventlet-0.9.16-py2.7.egg
 Processing dependencies for eventlet
 Searching for greenlet>=0.3
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/greenlet/
Reading https://github.com/python-greenlet/greenlet
Reading http://bitbucket.org/ambroff/greenlet
Best match: greenlet 0.3.4
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/g/greenlet/greenlet-   0.3.4.zip#md5=530a69acebbb0d66eb5abd83523d8272
Processing greenlet-0.3.4.zip
Writing /tmp/easy_install-_aeHYm/greenlet-0.3.4/setup.cfg
Running greenlet-0.3.4/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-_aeHYm/greenlet-0.3.4/egg-dist-tmp-t9_gbW
In file included from greenlet.c:5:0:
greenlet.h:8:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1`

Why can't Python.h be found?

Answer 1

Your install is failing because you don't have the python development headers installed. You can do this through apt on ubuntu/debian with:

sudo apt-get install python-dev 

for python3 use:

sudo apt-get install python3-dev

For eventlet you might also need the libevent libraries installed so if you get an error talking about that you can install libevent with:

sudo apt-get install libevent-dev