issue with installing python newspaper package

Question

I am installing Python newspaper library with the following command in a virtual environment:

pip install newspaper

I get the following error. It still exists after I tried a few solutions from StackOverflow but it didn't work. I had the same issue before which I resolved with installing a specific version(and updating) of setup tools (different machine). However, it doesn't work here.

Any ideas what am I doing wrong? What does this error actually mean?

IDE: Pycharm with a virtual environment, Python 2.7 on Ubuntu

Error:

File "/tmp/tmp4L5_rz/distribute-0.6.21/pkg_resources.py", line 2229, in activate
        self.insert_on(path)
      File "/tmp/tmp4L5_rz/distribute-0.6.21/pkg_resources.py", line 2330, in insert_on
        "with distribute. Found one at %s" % str(self.location))
    ValueError: A 0.7-series setuptools cannot be installed with distribute. Found one at /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
    /tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/distribute-0.6.21-py2.7.egg
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/setup.py", line 23, in <module>
        distribute_setup.use_setuptools()
      File "/tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/distribute_setup.py", line 145, in use_setuptools
        return _do_download(version, download_base, to_dir, download_delay)
      File "/tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/distribute_setup.py", line 125, in _do_download
        _build_egg(egg, tarball, to_dir)
      File "/tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/distribute_setup.py", line 116, in _build_egg
        raise IOError('Could not build the egg.')
    IOError: Could not build the egg.

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-LTk2i0/nltk/

Answer 1

According to newspaper's Github documentation page, they have deprecated the Python 2 version of the API and have termed it as buggy. The exact statement as follows:

"Newspaper is a Python3 library! Or, view our deprecated and buggy Python2 branch"

Reference: https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper

It shows that we should not use the Python 2 version anymore.

For now, I switched to Python 3 for this specific use case.

Answer 2

Try reinstall setuptools

pip install --upgrade setuptools

if not work, remove distribute:

rm -fr /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/distribute*

Answer 3

can confirm that this

pip install --upgrade setuptools

cleared up the installation issue on ec2