16 Sep 09

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Written by Vishwajeet Singh. 37 comments

Solving the build error Python.h: No such file or directory on Ubuntu


I was struggling due to this problem for two days now and got the solution just now so thought I will share it
with you all; as I don’t want anyone else to land up in trouble as i did so I am using Hardy and was trying to build subvertpy from source as the package was not available for same.

The problem occurs due to absence of Python development headers as many python modules have dependency on  Python development headers to compile.

Solution is to install development headers using package manager; open the terminal and issue the following commands

sudo apt-cache search python

and select the package that matches your installation as in my case it is python2.5-dev; issue the following command to install it

sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev

This will install development headers in /usr/include/python2.5 and now you can build your python module successfully.


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37 Comments.

  • nata says:
    December 18, 2009 at 11:49

    Thank you very much!
    I was upgrading twisted to 9.0.0 with easy_install utility in Ubuntu 9.0 and came across the same problem.
    Installing python2.6-dev solved it.

  • Vishwajeet Singh says:
    December 18, 2009 at 12:03

    I am glad that it helped you.

  • tghasd says:
    April 23, 2010 at 16:59

    Very helpful, thanks!

  • Shariq says:
    May 10, 2010 at 11:29

    I am Suse LINUX (11.1)
    And when I am including
    #include
    its not able to find this library.

    The above help does’nt work in SUSE LINUX.
    Please help .

    Thanks
    Shariq

  • Shariq says:
    May 10, 2010 at 11:30

    I am Suse LINUX (11.1)
    And when I am including
    #include<Python.h>
    its not able to find this library.

    The above help does\’nt work in SUSE LINUX.
    Please help .

    Thanks
    Shariq

  • Shariq says:
    May 10, 2010 at 11:30

    I am Suse LINUX (11.1)
    And when I am including
    #include&lt;Python.h&gt;
    its not able to find this library.

    The above help does\\\’nt work in SUSE LINUX.
    Please help .

    Thanks
    Shariq

  • Shariq says:
    May 10, 2010 at 11:31

    I am Suse LINUX (11.1)
    And when I am including
    #include&amp;lt;Python.h&amp;gt;
    its not able to find this library.

    The above help does\\\\\\\’nt work in SUSE LINUX.
    Please help .

    Thanks
    Shariq

  • Shariq says:
    May 10, 2010 at 11:32

    I am Suse LINUX (11.1)
    And when I am including
    #include Python.h
    its not able to find this library.

    The above help does not work in SUSE LINUX.
    Please help .

    Thanks
    Shariq

  • Vishwajeet Singh says:
    May 10, 2010 at 12:55

    Do you have the python-devel package installed on your machine?

  • Rob says:
    June 23, 2010 at 19:40

    Thanks so much!

  • stephenrs says:
    September 4, 2010 at 23:56

    Thank you, thank you, thank you. Your post was the first one I found after encountering this problem, and your solution worked perfectly. Saved me so much time. Much appreciated.

  • Vishwajeet Singh says:
    September 5, 2010 at 02:35

    I am glad that it helped you thanks for your kind remarks :)

  • bill says:
    October 22, 2010 at 13:31

    Thanks a lot :-)

  • thank you says:
    November 30, 2010 at 14:44

    thanks!

  • moin says:
    December 4, 2010 at 19:50

    Thank you very much!!!!

  • scattel2z says:
    January 31, 2011 at 01:25

    I’ve been struggling to this one out for a while. THANK YOU, it’s working now!

  • rajn says:
    February 10, 2011 at 09:26

    Worked perfect. You saved me buckets of time and trouble.

  • Karim Mattar says:
    March 13, 2011 at 05:49

    You’re awesome! Thanks for sharing. I ran into this problem two minutes ago, found this page and fixed my problem in two seconds! :) Sorry it took you two days…but thanks again for sparing the rest of us the time and trouble!

  • Eric says:
    April 8, 2011 at 18:15

    You are great! Thanks for sharing, this really helps me so much, and I am super happy after solving this problem!

  • Gagan says:
    April 14, 2011 at 16:21

    Thanks Vishwajeet

    your input is quite helpful.

    Reg
    Gagan

  • Matt says:
    June 10, 2011 at 03:45

    Thanks that worked for me, using ‘python-dev’

  • Ben says:
    July 17, 2011 at 09:22

    Just wanted to add my voice to the large crowd expressing appreciation that you took the time and effort to post this solution. Saved me quite a bit of pain!

  • JC says:
    July 24, 2011 at 08:30

    Thanks a lot! Solved my reportlab installation issue on Ubuntu 10.04 server :)

  • Daniela says:
    August 12, 2011 at 16:06

    Thanks very much, Its rare that I find a quick solution for my building problems!
    Great!!!

  • Ben says:
    August 21, 2011 at 01:30

    Dude. I fricken love you.
    !!!

  • Dhivya says:
    September 8, 2011 at 06:12

    Thank you so much!! U saved me a lot of time :)

  • Nara Narasimhan says:
    September 14, 2011 at 08:20

    I am on Ubuntu 11.04. I was trying to install latest Django, and this got me past my problem compiling MySQLdb. You could actually select the python-dev package in synaptic, and it will select the right python release for you (2.7 in my case).

  • Stratus says:
    October 14, 2011 at 22:57

    I stopped in just to say that this helped me overcome a problem I was having with cxfreeze on debian stable

    So thanks!

  • Andreas says:
    October 24, 2011 at 03:10

    Very much appreciated!

    sudo apt-get install python2.6-dev

    saved me lots of time building yenc on Ubuntu 11.04

  • Schuh says:
    October 27, 2011 at 17:45

    This solved problems installing Root with pyroot from trunk on Ubuntu 11.10.
    Before, the python command
    import ROOT
    got me an import error:

    import libPyROOT as _root
    ImportError: No module named libPyROOT

    After running
    sudo apt-get install python-dev
    and recompiling Root, pyRoot works flawlessly

    Thanks !

  • trantor says:
    October 29, 2011 at 07:52

    Thank you!!

  • Chaya says:
    November 9, 2011 at 15:35

    Thank u so much:)

  • David says:
    November 13, 2011 at 08:10

    How to Install Cyn.in on ubuntu desktop 11.10 ?

  • Guido Cecilio says:
    November 28, 2011 at 18:58

    Thanks very much for have shared something that might be small but can make you spend valuable time.

  • carlos josé duarte (@tulakalbeyo) says:
    December 1, 2011 at 10:12

    it worked! ran into this error while installing orange http://orange.biolab.si/nightly_builds.html thanks a lot! cheers!

  • jacques Theron says:
    December 10, 2011 at 23:08

    Thank you – this post gave me the fix to an issue which has wasted a good 2 hours of my time!
    Used it to to a pip install psycopg2 on ubuntu 10.04 with python2.7 added
    Thanks for publishing

  • thanks says:
    December 14, 2011 at 00:39

    worked for my ubuntu… thanks!!!



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