Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory \\METADATA

Question

I relatively new to coding so I am not (yet) running virtual environments. Rather, I am just downloading packages with pip straight to my pc to run python 3.7 in atom.

When I tried to use pip the other day to install the scrapy package like so -m pip install --user scrapy

I got this error: Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'c:\\users\\adrian\\appdata\\roaming\\python\\python37\\site-packages\\pip-19.0.1.dist-info\\METADATA'

Most of the other answers I have seen on related errors had people use conda to install some type of fix I think? When I tried to use conda to execute one of the fixes I recieved a CondaHTTPError: SSLError(MaxRetryError('HTTPSConnectionPool(host=\'repo.anaconda.com\', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /pkgs/free/noarch/repodata.json.bz2 (Caused by SSLError("Can\'t connect to HTTPS URL because the SSL module is not available.

Any direction would be heartily appreciated :-)

Answer 1

TL;DR:

Problem: Long install path

Solution: Install the desired python package (in my case tensorflow) in the folder which has a shorter path (for example C:/my_py_packages/some_package) or set the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem@LongPathsEnabled to 1 as mentioned here.

Original answer: I got here by having this kind of error when I tried installing tensorflow library. My error was the following:

Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'c:\moj ifajlovi\faks\11master\1semestar\siap-sistemizaistrazivanjeianalizupodataka_(datamining)\projek at\rad\venvs\siap_venv\Lib\site-packages\tensorflow_estimator\python\estimator\canned\line ar_optimizer\python\utils\__pycache__\sharded_mutable_dense_hashtable.cpython-37.pyc'

So, there was no sharded_mutable_dense_hashtable.cpython-37.pyc file in the __pycache__ directory. But, sharded_mutable_dense_hashtable.cpython-37.pyc file was in the utils directory (which is the parent directory of __pycache__ directory).

That's why I tried manually copying the sharded_mutable_dense_hashtable.cpython-37.pyc file in the __pycache__ directory. When I tried that, I had a copy error which stated that the path was too long, so it couldn't put the file in the directory.

So, the solution:

Install the desired python package (in my case tensorflow) in the folder which has a shorter path (for example C:/my_py_packages/some_package) or set the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem@LongPathsEnabled to 1 as mentioned here.