I’ve installed Python 3.5 and while running

pip install mysql-python

it gives me the following error

error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required (Unable to find vcvarsall.bat)

I have added the following lines to my Path

C:\Program Files\Python 3.5\Scripts\;
C:\Program Files\Python 3.5\;

C:\Windows\System32;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC

I have a 64bit win 7 setup in my PC.

What could be the solution for mitigating this error and installing the modules correctly via pip.

Your path only lists Visual Studio 11 and 12, it wants 14, which is Visual Studio 2015. If you install that, and remember to tick the box for Languages->C++ then it should work.

On my Python 3.5 install, the error message was a little more useful, and included the URL to get it from

 error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools": http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

Edit: New working link

Edit: As suggested by Lightfire228, you may also need to upgrade setuptools package for the error to disappear:

pip install --upgrade setuptools

Binary install it the simple way!

I can’t believe no one has suggested this already – use the binary-only option for pip. For example, for mysqlclient:

pip install --only-binary :all: mysqlclient

Many packages don’t create a build for every single release which forces your pip to build from source. If you’re happy to use the latest pre-compiled binary version, use --only-binary :all: to allow pip to use an older binary version.

To solve any of the following errors:

• Failed building wheel for misaka
• Failed to build misaka
• Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required
• Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

The Solution is:

1. Go to Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017

2. Select free download under Visual Studio Community 2017. This will download the installer. Run the installer.

3. Select what you need under workload tab:

   a. Under Windows, there are 3 choices. Only check Desktop development with C++

   b. Under Web & Cloud, there are 7 choices. Only check Python development (I believe this is optional But I have done it).

4. In cmd, type pip3 install misaka

Note if you already installed Visual Studio then when you run the installer, you can modify yours (click modify button under Visual Studio Community 2017) and do steps 3 and 4

Final Note : If you don’t want to install all modules, having the 3 ones below (or a newer version of the VC++ 2017) would be sufficient. (you can also install the Visual Studio Build Tools with only these options so you dont need to install Visual Studio Community Edition itself) => This minimal install is already a 4.5GB, so saving off anything is helpful

As the other responses pointed out, one solution is to install Visual Studio 2015. However, it takes a few GBs of disk space. One way around is to install precompiled binaries. The webpage http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs (mirror) contains precompiled binaries for many Python packages. After downloading the package of interest to you, you can install it using pip install, e.g. pip install mysqlclient‑1.3.10‑cp35‑cp35m‑win_amd64.whl.

I had the exact issue while trying to install Scrapy web scraping Python framework on my Windows 10 machine. I figured out the solution this way:

1. Download the latest (the last one) wheel file from this link 👉 wheel file for twisted package

2. I’d recommend saving that wheel file in the directory where you’ve installed Python i.e somewhere in Local Disk C

3. Then visit the folder where the wheel file exists and run pip install <*wheel file's name*>

4. Finally run the command pip install Scrapy again and you’re good to use Scrapy or any other tool which required you to download massive Windows C++ Package/SDK.

Disclaimer: This solution worked for me while trying to install Scrapy, but I can’t guarantee the same happening while installing other softwares/packages/etc.✌

I had this exact issue while trying to install mayavi.

So I also had the common error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required when pip installing a library.

After looking across many web pages and the solutions to this thread, with none of them working. I figured these steps (most taken from previous solutions) allowed this to work.

1. Go to Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 and install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017. Which is under All downloads (scroll down) >> Tools for Visual Studio 2017
   • If you have already installed this skip to 2.

2. Select the C++ Components you require (I didn’t know which I required so installed many of them).
   • If you have already installed Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 then open the application Visual Studio Installer then go to Visual Studio Build Tools 2017 >> Modify >> Individual Components and selected the required components.
   • From other answers important components appear to be: C++/CLI support, VC++ 2017 version <...> latest, Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable Update, Visual C++ tools for CMake, Windows 10 SDK <...> for Desktop C++, Visual C++ Build Tools core features, Visual Studio C++ core features.

3. Install/Modify these components for Visual Studio Build Tools 2017.

4. This is the important step. Open the application Visual Studio Installer then go to Visual Studio Build Tools >> Launch. Which will open a CMD window at the correct location for Microsoft Visual Studio\YYYY\BuildTools.

5. Now enter python -m pip install --upgrade setuptools within this CMD window.

6. Finally, in this same CMD window pip install your python library: pip install -U <library>.

I had the same problem when installing spaCy module. And I checked control panel I have several visual C++ redistributables installed already.

What I did was select “Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015” which is already installed on my PC –> “Modify” –>check “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015”. Then it will take some time and download more than 1 GB to install it.

This fixed my issue. Now I have spaCy installed.

I had this same problem. A solution for updating setuptools

pip install -U setuptools

or

pip install setuptools --upgrade

After reading a lot of answers in SO and none of them working, I finally managed to solve it following the steps in this thread, I will leave here the steps in case the page dissapears:

Please try to install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017, select the workload “Visual C++ build tools” and check the options “C++/CLI support” and “VC++ 2015.3 v14.00 (v140) toolset for desktop” as below.

Hope it helps as it did for me.

Make sure that you’ve installed these required packages.Worked perfectly in my case as i installed the checked packages

To expand on the answers by ocean800, davidsheldon and user3661384:

You should now no longer use Visual Studio Tools 2015 since a newer version is available. As indicated by the Python documentation you should be using Visual Studio Tools 2017 instead.

Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 was upgraded by Microsoft to Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017.

Download it from here

You will require also need setuptools, if you don’t have setup tools run:

pip install setuptools

Or if you already have it, be sure to upgrade it.

pip install setuptools --upgrade

For the Python documentation link above you will see that setuptools version must be at least 34.4.0. for VS Tools to work

Use this link to download and install Visual C++ 2015 Build Tools. It will automatically download visualcppbuildtools_full.exe and install Visual C++ 14.0 without actually installing Visual Studio. After the installation completes, retry pip install and you won’t get the error again.

I have tested it on following platform and versions:

Python 3.6 on Windows 7 64-bit
Python 3.8 on Windows 10 64-bit

I have same suggestion as a comment to the question, however, I have been requested to post this as an answer as it helped a lot of people. So I posted it as an answer.

I had exactly the same issue and solved it by installing mysql-connector-python with:

pip install mysql-connector-python

I am on python3.7 & windows 10 and installing Microsoft Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 (as described here) did not solve my problem that was identical to yours.

I had the same issue. Downloading the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 worked for me. Find it here

Use the link to Visual C++ 2015 Build Tools. That will install Visual C++ 14.0 without installing Visual Studio.

Just had the same issue while using the latest Python 3.6. With Windows OS 10 Home Edition and 64 Bit Operation System

Steps to solve this issue :

1. Uninstall any versions of Visual studio you have had, through Control Panel
2. Install Visual Studio 2015 and chose the default option that will install Visual C++ 14.0 on its own
3. You can use Pycharm for installing scrapy ->Project->Project Interpreter->+ (install scrapy)
4. check scrapy in REPL and pycharm by import , you should not see any errors

had a similar situation installing pymssql

pip was trying to build the package because there were no official wheels
for python 3.6 & windows.

solved it by downloading an unoffical wheel from here:
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

specifically for your case -> http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#mysql-python

I had the same problem. I needed a 64-bit version of Python so I installed 3.5.0 (the most recent as of writing this). After switching to 3.4.3 all of my module installations worked.

Python Releases for Windows

None of the solutions here and elsewhere worked for me. Turns out an incompatible 32bit version of mysqlclient is being installed on my 64bit Windows 10 OS because I’m using a 32bit version of Python

I had to uninstall my current Python 3.7 32bit, and reinstalled Python 3.7 64bit and everything is working fine now

Look if the package have an official fork that include the necessary binary wheels.

I needed the package python-Levenshtein, had this error, and find the package python-Levenshtein-wheels instead.

Just go to https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ find your suitable package (whl file). Download it. Go to the download folder in cmd or typing ‘cmd’ on the address bar of the folder. Run the command :

pip install mysqlclient-1.4.6-cp38-cp38-win32.whl

(Type the file name correctly. I have given an example only). Your problem will be solved without installing build toll cpp of 6GB size.

to add on top of @Sushant Chaudhary’s answer

in my case, I got another error regarding lxml as below

copying src\lxml\isoschematron\resources\xsl\iso-schematron-xslt1\readme.txt -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.7\lxml\isoschematron\resources\xsl\iso-schematron-xslt1
running build_ext
building 'lxml.etree' extension
error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools": http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

I had to install lxml‑4.2.3‑cp37‑cp37m‑win_amd64.whl same way as in the answer of @Sushant Chaudhary to successfully complete installation of Scrapy.

1. Download lxml‑4.2.3‑cp37‑cp37m‑win_amd64.whl from https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml
2. put it in folder where python is installed
3. install it using pip install <file-name>

now you can run pip install scrapy

Oops! Looks like they don’t have Windows wheels on PyPI.

In the meantime, installing from source probably works or try downloading MSVC++ 14 as suggested in the error message and by others on this page.

Christoph’s site also has unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages (.whl files).

Follow steps mentioned in following links to install binaries :

1. Directly in base python
2. In virtual environments / Pycharm

Also check :

Which binary to download??

for Python 3.7.4 following set of commands worked: Before those command, you need to confirm Desktop with C++ and Python is installed in Visual Studio.

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build"
vcvarsall.bat x86_amd64
cd \
set CL=-FI"%VCINSTALLDIR%\tools\msvc\14.16.27023\include\stdint.h"


pip install pycrypto

I had the same issue while installing mysqlclient for the Django project.

In my case, it’s the system architecture mismatch causing the issue. I have Windows 7 64bit version on my system. But, I had installed Python 3.7.2 32 bit version by mistake.

So, I re-installed Python interpreter (64bit) and ran the command

pip install mysqlclient

I hope this would work with other Python packages as well.

I had the same exact issue on my windows 10 python version 3.8. In my case, I needed to install mysqlclient were the error occurred Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Because installing visual studio and it’s packages could be a tedious process, Here’s what I did:

step 1 – Go to unofficial python binaries from any browser and open its website.

step 2 – press ctrl+F and type whatever you want. In my case it was mysqlclient.

step 3 – Go into it and choose according to your python version and windows system. In my case it was mysqlclient‑1.4.6‑cp38‑cp38‑win32.whl and download it.

step 4 – open command prompt and specify the path where you downloaded your file. In my case it was C:\Users\user\Downloads

step 5 – type pip install .\mysqlclient‑1.4.6‑cp38‑cp38‑win32.whl and press enter.

Thus it was installed successfully, after which I went my project terminal re-entered the required command. This solved my problem

Note that, while working on the project in pycharm, I also tried installing mysql-client from the project interpreter. But mysql-client and mysqlclient are different things. I have no idea why and it did not work.

I was facing the same problem. The following worked for me: Download the unoffical binaries file from Christoph Gohlke installers site as per the python version installed on your system. Navigate to the folder where you have installed the file and run

pip install filename

For me python_ldap‑3.0.0‑cp35‑cp35m‑win_amd64.whl worked as my machine is 64 bit and python version is 3.5. This successfully installed python-ldap on my windows machine. You can try the same for mysql-python

This works for me:
pip install --only-binary :all: mysqlclient

If Visual Studio is NOT your thing, and instead you are using VS Code, then this link will guide you thru the installer to get C++ running on your Windows.

You only needs to complete the Pre-Requisites part. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-msvc/#_prerequisites

This is similar with other answers, but this link will probably age better than some of the responses here.

PS: don’t forget to run pip install --upgrade setuptools