Here is the problem

I have a requirements.txt that looks like:

BeautifulSoup==3.2.0
Django==1.3
Fabric==1.2.0
Jinja2==2.5.5
PyYAML==3.09
Pygments==1.4
SQLAlchemy==0.7.1
South==0.7.3
amqplib==0.6.1
anyjson==0.3
...

I have a local archive directory containing all the packages + others.

I have created a new virtualenv with

bin/virtualenv testing

upon activating it, I tried to install the packages according to requirements.txt from the local archive directory.

source bin/activate
pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt -f file:///path/to/archive/

I got some output that seems to indicate that the installation is fine

Downloading/unpacking Fabric==1.2.0 (from -r ../testing/requirements.txt (line 3))
  Running setup.py egg_info for package Fabric
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*' found under directory 'docs/_build'
    warning: no files found matching 'fabfile.py'
Downloading/unpacking South==0.7.3 (from -r ../testing/requirements.txt (line 8))
  Running setup.py egg_info for package South
....

But later check revealed none of the package is installed properly. I cannot import the package, and none is found in the site-packages directory of my virtualenv. So what went wrong?

This works for me:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt --no-index --find-links file:///tmp/packages

--no-index – Ignore package index (only looking at --find-links URLs instead).

-f, --find-links <URL> – If a URL or path to an html file, then parse for links to archives. If a local path or file:// URL that’s a directory, then look for archives in the directory listing.

I’ve read the above, realize this is an old question, but it’s totally unresolved and still at the top of my google search results so here’s an answer that works for everyone:

pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt

For virtualenv to install all files in the requirements.txt file.

1. cd to the directory where requirements.txt is located
2. activate your virtualenv
3. run: pip install -r requirements.txt in your shell

I had a similar problem. I tried this:

pip install -U -r requirements.txt 

(-U = update if it had already installed)

But the problem continued. I realized that some of generic libraries for development were missed.

sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev python-tk

I don’t know if this would help you.

pip install -r requirements.txt

For further details please check the help option.

pip install --help

We can find the option ‘-r’

-r, –requirement Install from the given requirements file. This option can be used multiple times.

Further information on some commonly used pip install options: (This is the help option on pip install command)

Also the above is the complete set of options. Please use pip install –help for complete list of options.

Short answer

pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt

or in another form:

python -m pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt

Explanation

Here, -r is short form of --requirement and it asks the pip to install from the given requirements file.

pip will start installation only after checking the availability of all listed items in the requirements file and it won’t start installation even if one requirement is unavailable.

One workaround to install the available packages is installing listed packages one by one. Use the following command for that. A red color warning will be shown to notify you about the unavailable packages.

cat requirements.txt | xargs -n 1 pip install

To ignore comments (lines starting with a #) and blank lines, use:

cat requirements.txt | cut -f1 -d"#" | sed '/^\s*$/d' | xargs -n 1 pip install

Often, you will want a fast install from local archives, without probing PyPI.

First, download the archives that fulfill your requirements:

$ pip install --download <DIR> -r requirements.txt

Then, install using –find-links and –no-index:

$ pip install --no-index --find-links=[file://]<DIR> -r requirements.txt

I work with a lot of systems that have been mucked by developers “following directions they found on the internet”. It is extremely common that your pip and your python are not looking at the same paths/site-packages. For this reason, when I encounter oddness I start by doing this:

$ python -c 'import sys; print(sys.path)'
['', '/usr/lib/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload', '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages']

$ pip --version
pip 9.0.1 from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)

That is a happy system.

Below is an unhappy system. (Or at least it’s a blissfully ignorant system that causes others to be unhappy.)

$ pip --version
pip 9.0.1 from /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages (python 3.6)

$ python -c 'import sys; print(sys.path)'
['', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python27.zip',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages']

$ which pip pip2 pip3
/usr/local/bin/pip
/usr/local/bin/pip3

It is unhappy because pip is (python3.6 and) using /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages while python is (python2.7 and) using /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

When I want to make sure I’m installing requirements to the right python, I do this:

$ which -a python python2 python3
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/local/bin/python2
/usr/local/bin/python3

$ /usr/bin/python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

You’ve heard, “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.” The DevOps version of that is, “If you didn’t break it and you can work around it, don’t try to fix it.”

first of all, create a virtual environment

in python 3.6

virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3.6 <path/to/new/virtualenv/>

in python 2.7

virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python2.7 <path/to/new/virtualenv/>

then activate the environment and install all the packages available in the requirement.txt file.

source <path/to/new/virtualenv>/bin/activate
pip install -r <path/to/requirement.txt>

Installing requirements.txt file inside virtual env with python 3:

I had the same issue. I was trying to install requirements.txt file inside a virtual environament. I found the solution.

Initially, I created my virtual env in this way:

virtualenv -p python3 myenv

Activate the environment using:

source myenv/bin/activate

Now I installed the requirements.txt using:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Installation was successful and I was able to import the modules.

try this

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

pip install --user -r requirements.txt 

OR

pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt