tox dies with "could not install deps" ?

I just wanted to test out the docs we have in CONTRIBUTING.rst, so I did the following:

$ git clone [e-mail]:GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-python.git
Cloning into 'gcloud-python'...
remote: Counting objects: 24123, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (158/158), done.
remote: Total 24123 (delta 113), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 23963
Receiving objects: 100% (24123/24123), 33.61 MiB | 53.43 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18898/18898), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

$ cd gcloud-python/

$ sudo /usr/bin/pip install tox --upgrade
Downloading/unpacking tox from https://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/t/tox/tox-2.1.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl#md5=c358c3c64e3ed21de9f0c5184c959097
  Downloading tox-2.1.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Downloading/unpacking virtualenv>=1.11.2 from https://pypi.python.org/packages/py2.py3/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-13.1.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl#md5=6e7b25033b4aadb262598b76b12edf3a (from tox)
  Downloading virtualenv-13.1.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.7MB): 1.7MB downloaded
Downloading/unpacking py>=1.4.17 from https://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/p/py/py-1.4.30-py2.py3-none-any.whl#md5=d0faee5774a42313943d4ceaf61b930b (from tox)
  Downloading py-1.4.30-py2.py3-none-any.whl (81kB): 81kB downloaded
Downloading/unpacking pluggy<0.4.0,>=0.3.0 (from tox)
  Downloading pluggy-0.3.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: tox, virtualenv, py, pluggy
  Found existing installation: tox 1.6.0
    Not uninstalling tox at /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages, owned by OS
  Found existing installation: virtualenv 1.11.6
    Uninstalling virtualenv:
      Not removing or modifying (outside of prefix):
      /usr/bin/virtualenv
      Successfully uninstalled virtualenv
  Found existing installation: py 1.4.20
    Not uninstalling py at /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages, owned by OS
Successfully installed tox virtualenv py pluggy
Cleaning up...

So far so good… And then…

$ /usr/bin/tox -e py27
GLOB sdist-make: /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/setup.py
py27 create: /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox/py27
py27 installdeps: nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1
ERROR: could not install deps [nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1]
____________________________________________________________________________________ summary ____________________________________________________________________________________
ERROR:   py27: could not install deps [nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1]

$ /usr/bin/tox -e py27 -v
using tox.ini: /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/tox.ini
using tox-1.6.0 from /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tox/__init__.pyc
GLOB sdist-make: /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/setup.py
  /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python$ /usr/bin/python /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/setup.py sdist --formats=zip --dist-dir /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox/dist >/usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox/log/tox-0.log
py27 create: /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox/py27
  /usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox$ /usr/bin/python2.7 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/virtualenv.py --setuptools --python /usr/bin/python2.7 py27 >/usr/local/google/home/jjg/gcloud-python/.tox/py27/log/py27-0.log
py27 installdeps: nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1
ERROR: could not install deps [nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1]
____________________________________________________________________________________ summary ____________________________________________________________________________________
ERROR:   py27: could not install deps [nose, unittest2, protobuf==3.0.0-alpha-1]

Any idea what’s going on here? The screams of some permission error (like it needs to install something in a directory it doesn’t have access to write to…), but I thought the whole point of tox was to dynamically create virtual environments without me needing to ask… no?

[jgeewax]

OK so… I did the following:

$ sudo apt-get remove python-pip
$ sudo easy_install pip
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/pip /usr/bin/pip # For whatever reason, it didn't do this for me...
$ sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip tox virtualenv
$ git clone [e-mail]:GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-python.git
$ cd gcloud-python
$ tox -e py27

Great success!

Hopefully this helps someone else when they run into this…

[dhermes]

It’s doubtful but https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/539 may have something to do with it.

Can you

sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip tox virtualenv

and try again?