Python package installation error - py_compiler msvc not found

Question

I'm trying to install the chatterbot package on Python 3.8.3 under Windows 10 64-bit and encountering a strange error that I suspect must be related to some directory or PATH setting which, I hope, is an easy fix ... I just don't know how yet.

Basically the first time I tried to install chatterbot (pip install chatterbot) it failed as the Visual C++ 14.0 requirement was not met. I followed the instructions here to install Visual C++, restarted, ran pip install --upgrade setuptools and it returned that the requirement is already up to date, version 49.6.0.

I tried running pip install chatter again and now get a different error, see excerpt below. Basically it is happy that Visual C++ is there, but can't actually find the compiler.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Complete output (25 lines):
      BLIS_COMPILER? None
      running install
      running build
      running build_py
      creating build
      creating build\lib.win-amd64-3.8
      creating build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\about.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\benchmark.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\__init__.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      creating build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis\tests
      copying blis\tests\common.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis\tests
      copying blis\tests\test_dotv.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis\tests
      copying blis\tests\test_gemm.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis\tests
      copying blis\tests\__init__.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis\tests
      copying blis\cy.pyx -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\py.pyx -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\cy.pxd -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      copying blis\__init__.pxd -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.8\blis
      running build_ext
      error: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified
      msvc
      py_compiler msvc

I don't typically use Anaconda, but installed it and tried 'conda install chatterbot' and got a package not found error :( Pip finds the package no problem, it just can't find msvc to compile it (or one of its dependents). Is there some way to manually find the msvc compiler and update the environment or path to point to it? — Ross, Aug 18 '20 at 17:03
@Ross any update on this? I faced exactly the same problem here. — christian, Nov 25 '20 at 14:20

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 27 '20 at 01:16

I also had the same issue but now I think I found a work around this.

First I installed latest version of spacy. The blis compilation was needed for an old version of spacy. But latest version of spacy comes in a compiled version, so no need to use msvc.

pip install -U spacy

Next, I installed chatterbot from the github source code.

git clone https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot.git
pip install ./ChatterBot

When you install latest version from ChatterBot repo, you will need to revise Chatterbot/setup.py to be compatible with Python3.8.x - for now it only supports <=3.8

Python package installation error - py_compiler msvc not found

1 Answers1