Unable to install 64-bit Pygame on Python 3.4

Question

I have 64-bit python 3.4 installed, which comes with pip. I wanted to install pygame, and I know that the 32 bit version that they have on their site wouldn't work with my version of python. So I downloaded the 64-bit python 3.4 pygame package from here (pygame‑1.9.2a0‑cp34‑none‑win_amd64.whl). I renamed the package to pygame.whl and tried to use pip on the command line to install it, but it gave me this error;

Collecting pygame
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement pygame (from versions:
)
Some externally hosted files were ignored as access to them may be unreliable
(use --allow-external pygame to allow).
No matching distribution found for pygame

So I tried using the --allow-external option, but it gave me a different error and asked me to provide a requirements file. I looked around, and found that I might need to try using the --pre option, but it gave me the exact same error as above regardless. How can I install the package?

Answer 1

The most likely reason you failed to install the .whl package is that you typed

pip install pygame

at the command prompt, instead of switching to the directory where you stored your renamed pygame.whl and running

pip install pygame.whl

pip requires that you give the full name of the file being installed.

The error message you got indicates that you ran the first command, and pip was looking in PyPI for pygame (which isn't there). The --allow-external command would have allowed you to specify a remote location where a source file or .whl file could be found.

In the future, I'd recommand not renaming the files downloaded from the (quite excellent) site you linked to, so that when you try to install them you're sure you're running the right command. Remember, you can always use Tab to complete file names on the command line.