ImportError: cannot import name 'sysconfig' from 'distutils' (/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/__init__.py)

Question

I installed pip3 using sudo apt-get install python3-pip after that when I run the following command to install django sudo pip3 install django I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/pip3", line 9, in from pip import main File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/ init .py", line 14, in from pip.utils import get_installed_distributions, get_prog File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/utils/ init .py", line 23, in from pip.locations import ( File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/locations.py", line 9, in from distutils import sysconfig ImportError: cannot import name 'sysconfig' from 'distutils' (/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/ init .py)

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

I have tried recently manually installing python3.9 version in my Ubuntu from 3.6 version using apt install python3.9 . Then pip3 was broken. The issue is because distutils were not build for the 3.9 version.

So in my case I ran apt install python3.9-distutils to resolve my issue.

In your case make sure to modify 3.x version in distutils command.

Answer 2

This helped but then I got another error: ImportError: No module named 'pip._internal'

The following fixed it:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

python3 get-pip.py --force-reinstall