make pip ignore an existing wheel

Question

If a .whl is available online, pip always installs it rather than compiling from source. However, for some specific module, the wheel happened to be compiled for the next processor generation and doesn't run on a specific machine.

If I command it to just download the package, then it still downloads the wheel rather than source. Does pip have some mechanism to override this preference?

Solution

Try using

pip install <package> --no-binary :all:

---

You can find this option (and the values it takes) in pip install --help.

There's also the --no-use-wheel option, but that has been deprecated in favour of the above and removed in pip 10.0.0.

Here is reference in official documentation:

https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_install/#install-no-binary

Comments

[ivan_pozdeev]

@MosesKoledoye No, this isn't affected by the local cache.

[Moses Koledoye]

Pardon me. I think you could do the install directly from git if the source has one with pip install git+https://repourl

[ivan_pozdeev]

@MosesKoledoye then I need to somehow manually learn that the package has a git repo online and where it is. FWIW, I can locale the source manually and compile it, all without pip.

[Antti Haapala -- Слава Україні]

also, you should report such a wheel to upstream, clearly its version is not tagged correctly

[ivan_pozdeev]

@AnttiHaapala it's tagged "win32". I'm not aware of any more specific (e.g. "ix86") markings existing for wheels. Are there?

[TheDudeAbides]

Ran into this problem with a homebrew Python installation and a wheel for python-levenshtein that was built with 4-byte Unicode (UCS-4) symbols, whereas my Python was only UCS-2. The traceback I got was similar to that described here: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_FromUnicode. Using pip install --no-binary to install from source (ignoring the wheel) totally did the trick!

[Tobias Feil]

Suggested edit queue is full but here is the correct link: pip.pypa.io/en/stable/cli/pip_install/#cmdoption-no-binary