Error after upgrading pip cannot import name main

Question

Whenever I am trying to install any package using pip, I am getting this import error:

dey@niroj-notebook:~$ pip3 install numpy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip3", line 9, in <module>
    from pip import main
ImportError: cannot import name 'main'

dey@niroj-notebook:~$ cat `which pip3`
#!/usr/bin/python3
# GENERATED BY DEBIAN

import sys

# Run the main entry point, similarly to how setuptools does it, but because
# we didn't install the actual entry point from setup.py, don't use the
# pkg_resources API.
from pip import main
if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())

It was working fine earlier, I am not sure why it is throwing this error.

How to fix this error?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

You must have inadvertently upgraded your system pip (probably through something like sudo pip install pip --upgrade)

pip 10.x adjusts where its internals are situated. The pip3 command you're seeing is one provided by your package maintainer and is not a file managed by pip.

You'll probably want to not upgrade your system pip and instead use a virtualenv.

To recover the pip3 binary you'll need to sudo python3 -m pip uninstall pip && sudo apt install python3-pip --reinstall.

If you want to continue in "unsupported territory" ,you can probably get away with python3 -m pip instead of pip3.

Hope it helps!