pip install fails with missing `setuptools.command` error

I get the following stack trace trying to pip install or upgrate drfdocs, using Python 2.7, on both a mac running OS X 10.11.5 and a Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

[ubuntu@SEA] pip install --upgrade drfdocs
Downloading/unpacking drfdocs from https://pypi.python.org/packages/e5/9e/3a9aa6908ad7bd95b46f7fe05256681f4101de9a7769b6928159a986ef61/drfdocs-0.0.11.tar.gz#md5=ae42aba1e598ac110de74bdad0f3d3f4
  Downloading drfdocs-0.0.11.tar.gz (771kB): 771kB downloaded
  Running setup.py (path:<VIRTUAL_ENV_PATH>/build/drfdocs/setup.py) egg_info for package drfdocs
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 3, in <module>
    ImportError: No module named setuptools.command
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<string>", line 3, in <module>

ImportError: No module named setuptools.command

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...

Both installs were done within virtualenvs with django1.9 installed. pip versions were 1.5.4 & 1.5.6

I didn’t find this behavior with any other pip modules. Don’t know if it’s something DrfDocs is doing in its setup or some other setup-related issue.

Cheers!

[veryhappythings]

The reason this is happening for some people and not others, as far as I can tell, is that a fair number of people have $PYTHONPATH=. set somewhere in their environments. I had this, and it didn’t work - when I removed it, it worked. If you don’t have it, the site directory doesn’t get used instead of the built in library. I think there’s something on my system that sets this for me, because it was being set even when I removed it from my zshrc - perhaps a part of virtualenvwrapper?

As a quick fix, this should work:

unset PYTHONPATH
pip install drfdocs

[evandrone]

As a sidenote, got the same result with pip install drfdocs==0.0.10, but successfully installed 0.0.09 with pip install drfdocs==0.0.09