Getting "ReadError: not a gzip file" when trying to pip install TileStache on some machines

I hope you help me shed some light on this problem!

I found that when I run pip install TileStache on an ubuntu machine, it is failing with the error:

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/tarfile.py", line 1676, in open
    return func(name, filemode, fileobj, **kwargs)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/tarfile.py", line 1727, in gzopen
    raise ReadError("not a gzip file")
ReadError: not a gzip file

I noticed that when I wget http://tilestache.org/download/TileStache-1.46.7.tar.gz, I end up with the file as tar file (1.0MB), rather than a gzipped tar file (200KB). However when I download in the browser it is the gzipped tar file.

I think it might be something to do with the server response headers? As a comparison, I uploaded the gzipped tar file to CloudApp and ran pip install http://cl.ly/1O3I322n0S3m/TileStache-1.46.7.tar.gz, which works!

Any help much appreciated. Thanks!

[sleibman]

You closed this issue many months ago, so probably don’t care, but since your page comes up at the top of a google search for “pip not a gzip file”, I will add the following comment for posterity:

I encountered this same symptom with a new version of the pip client (1.5) working against a very old pypi server. The problem was that the pip code would gunzip while downloading the .tar.gz file, but leave the file extension as .tar.gz, and then when it tried to unpack the file, it would assume (based on the file extension) that it needed to gunzip again.

Note that wget works fine, consistent with your symptoms.

Possible fixes:

1. This could probably be fixed by updating my pypi server (with the hopes that a newer one would happen to supply a different MIME content-type encoding… based on the pip client code, application/x-gzip would work, but my pypi server supplies a content type of application/x-tar).
2. Restricting myself to pip 1.4 or earlier is an effective workaround.
3. Hacking up pip 1.5 as follows (is not a good approach, but…) also makes it work:

# diff /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/util.py.orig /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/util.py
542c542,548
<     tar = tarfile.open(filename, mode)
---
>     try:
>         tar = tarfile.open(filename, mode)
>     except:
>         # JUST UNTAR THE STINKING THING
>         mode = 'r'
>         tar = tarfile.open(filename, mode)
> 

[rburhum]

The file will need to be hosted by the official Pypi server at some point anyway since newer versions of pip will only work with self hosted (by default - which can be overridden, but then why do that).