ConfigParser Installation Error – python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 [Solved]

Error: The packstack command failed with an error message as “ImportError: No module named ConfigParser”. So I tried installing ConfigParser using Python PIP, but the installation failed as shown below.

$pip install ConfigParser
Collecting ConfigParser
 Downloading configparser-3.3.0r2.tar.gz
 Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
  from configparser import ConfigParser
 File "/tmp/pip-build-vks_efrb/ConfigParser/configparser.py", line 397
 _KEYCRE = re.compile(ur"%\(([^)]+)\)s")
 SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-vks_efrb/ConfigParser

What could be the problem?

Solution:

I googled and found a post@StackOverflow – where the best answer says “In Python version 3.x, ConfigParser module has been renamed to configparser as part of PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) 8”

It means, the package being installed does not support Python version 3.x. Well, I recently installed Python 3.5.1 – I’ll revert it back to older version of Python and see if the error goes off.

Check Python version

$python --version
Python 3.5.1

And had linked /usr/local/bin/python to python3.5.

ls -l /usr/local/bin/python
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Dec 11 15:19 /usr/local/bin/python -> python3.5

Linking python back to Python 2.7

I’ll now revert python back to Python version 2.7 and see if I can install ConfigParser.

$unlink python
$ln -s /usr/local/bin/python2.7 python

$ls -l python
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Jan 6 18:53 python -> /usr/local/bin/python2.7

Installing ConfigParser via pip install

Now, the default python command is linked to python2.7. Let’s install ConfigParser

$pip install ConfigParser
Collecting configparser
 Using cached configparser-3.3.0r2.tar.gz
Building wheels for collected packages: configparser
 Running setup.py bdist_wheel for configparser
 Stored in directory: /root/.cache/pip/wheels/1a/3e/f9/d34006ad6b1edfe5006aa704f5ee305c553344a7a6d8550c29
Successfully built configparser
Installing collected packages: configparser
Successfully installed configparser-3.3.0.post2

Viola! It worked.