Failing to create a virtualenv using python3.7 in Ubuntu 20.04

Luce

10/25/23, 9:01 PM

I have a system running Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS which comes with python3.8 by default. For some work purposes, I need to use a virtual environment in python 3.7. So, I installed python3.7 which has been successfully installed.

The output for $ python3.7 --version results in Python 3.7.15 as output and $ python3.7 results in python3.7 shell.

So, now I installed pip using, (as per documentations)

$ sudo apt install python3-venv python3-pip

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

For installing virtualenv I went via,

$ python3.7 -m pip install virtualenv

which went without a hitch.

Now to create my virtual environment, I went through, $ python3.7 -m virtualenv /path/to/venv/

which fails by giving me a ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util' error,

The entire output being,

$ python3.7 -m virtualenv /path/to/venv/
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 193, in _run_module_as_main
    "_main_", mod_spec)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 85, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_main_.py", line 16, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main import main as _main  # isort:skip # noqa
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main.py", line 10, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.autocompletion import autocomplete
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/autocompletion.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main_parser import create_main_parser
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main_parser.py", line 7, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli import cmdoptions
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/cmdoptions.py", line 19, in <module>
    from distutils.util import strtobool
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util'

How do I go forth resolving this? all I want is a python3.7 virtual environment in a Ubuntu 20.04 system.

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Ubuntu

Luce

10/28/23, 12:14 PM

I resolved the issue by installing distutils for python3.7 by $ sudo apt install python3.7-distutils

This fixed the issue and i was able to create the virtualenv successfully.

Only thing i had to keep in mind was to use pip3.7 in the virtual environment since the pip installed initially was based on python 3.8.10

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