Pipenv-Error: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip._internal'

Question

Today, I installed Pipenv via

pip install pipenv

As mentioned in the documentation I went to a test directory and created a new virtual environment using

pipenv shell

and tried to install a package via

pipenv install numpy

I got the following error message:

Installing numpy…
⠧
Error:  An error occurred while installing numpy!
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/florian/.local/share/virtualenvs/test-bJfQ6Jzk/bin/pip", line 7, in <module>
    from pip._internal import main
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip._internal'

This error occurs even after reinstalling pipenv, deleting all files and recreate the environment. It also had no impact if I ran pipenv install numpy inside or outside the environment.

Python 3.6.3
Pipenv 11.10.1

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I have had the same issue (python 3.5/Ubuntu 16.04LTS). Reinstalling pip with:

sudo apt install python-pip python-pip3 --reinstall

didn't solve the issue with me.

What worked in my case was reinstalling pipenv itself, from pip:

sudo pip3 install pipenv --force-reinstall

If you are running python 2.x or if your system is different than mine, you can try to replace pip3 with pip in the command:

sudo pip install pipenv --force-reinstall

Answer 2

Ubuntu 18.04, Python 3.6 :

Reinstalling pipenv did not work for me. Reinstall pip3 was the only issue, but

sudo apt install python3-pip

did not work too. Found a link to get pip3 in AskUbuntu.com which worked fine :

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
sudo python3 get-pip.py --force-reinstall

Answer 3

The environment pipenv is trying to use may be corrupt for the current project. Removing it, and re-running pipenv install worked in my case. I am on Fedora 35, where the python virtualenvs are located in ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/, this may be different in your case.

find out with virtualenvs are on your disk:

ls ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/

remove the ones belong to your project:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/yourprojectname*