Installing pydot and graphviz packages in Anaconda environment

gussilago picture gussilago · Dec 15, 2014 · Viewed 34.6k times · Source

I want to be able to create graphical decision trees in Python, and I am currently trying to install both pydot and graphviz.

I am using Anaconda as my environment (along with Spyder), and have tried to run the following lines of code

conda install -c https://conda.binstar.org/t/TOKEN/j14r pydot

with the result

Error: unknown host: http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/pro/win-32/
Error: unknown host: http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/win-32/
Error: unknown host: https://conda.binstar.org/t/TOKEN/j14r/win-32/
Error: No packages found matching: pydot

I have also tried using pip install pydot and pip install graphviz with similar results:

Downloading/unpacking pydot
  Cannot fetch index base URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement pydot
Cleaning up...
No distributions at all found for pydot
Storing complete log in [...]

I am getting pretty bored at trying to figure out how to go about this, so I was hoping anyone out there could give me some tips perhaps.

Thanks

Answer

Aleksander Lidtke picture Aleksander Lidtke · Jun 20, 2016

I had the same issue and solved it by (order is important):

  1. Installing graphviz, simply via sudo apt-get install graphviz
  2. Installing graphviz for Python via conda sudo ~/anaconda2/bin/conda install graphviz
  3. Finally, by installing pydot using conda sudo ~/anaconda2/bin/conda install pydot

This answer is overdue but this post helped me (together with this one that mentions the installation order), so hopefully this answer will help someone else. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 and Python 2.7.

P.S. apparently, there could be some issues with step 1 of the above algorithm, this post mentions how to fix them.