Can't load Python modules installed via pip from site-packages directory

Chase McCoy picture Chase McCoy · Aug 13, 2014 · Viewed 86.2k times · Source

I am trying to install and use the Evernote module (https://github.com/evernote/evernote-sdk-python) . I ran pip install evernote and it says that the installation worked.

I can confirm that the evernote module exists in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages. However, when I try to run python -c "import evernote" I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named evernote

This is the contents of my .bash-profile:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function*

# Setting PATH for Python 3.3
# The orginal version is saved in .bash_profile.pysave
PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/bin:${PATH}"
export PATH
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/

I am having this same problem with other modules installed with pip. Help?

EDIT: I am a super newbie and have not edited that .bash-profile file.

EDIT: python -c 'import sys; print "\n".join(sys.path)' Outputs the following:

/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/setuptools-1.3.2-py2.7.egg
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python27.zip
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-old
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/PyObjC
/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages

EDIT: I seemed to have made progress towards a solution by adding export PYTHONPATH=“/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages” to my .bash_profile file. However, now when I run python -c 'from evernote.api.client import EvernoteClient' it tries to import oauth2, which fails with the same error. The ouath2 module is present in the module directory.

Answer

Jason S picture Jason S · Aug 13, 2014

/usr/bin/python is the executable for the python that comes with OS X. /usr/local/lib is a location for user-installed programs only, possibly from Python.org or Homebrew. So you're mixing different Python installs, and changing the python path is only a partial workaround for different packages being installed for different installations.

In order to make sure you use the pip associated with a particular python, you can run python -m pip install <pkg>, or go look at what the pip on your path is, or is symlinked to.