Installing cryptography using pip on Raspbian Jessie image

Question

I am trying to get netmiko (which uses paramiko) installed on Raspbian Jessie so that I can script SSH commands from my Pi. It doesn't seem to be that netmiko works out-of-the-box as I had hoped. So here I am.

The cryptography library is a requirement and this is what I am struggling with. From a fresh Jessie image I went and run the following from the terminal in sequence:

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get upgrade
# sudo apt-get install gcc libffi-dev libssl-dev python-dev
# sudo pip install cryptography

Everything installs ok, however the last command returns:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 70, in <module>
    import packaging.version
ImportError: No module named packaging.version

When I now run # pip on its own I get the following returned:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 70, in <module>
    import packaging.version
ImportError: No module named packaging.version

I have been through the commands I run and pip works at every stage before the install cryptography command. It's like the cryptography install script broke pip.

Any help would be appreciated. I am new to Python and Linux.

Answer 1

Re-installing pip seems to have fixed it. Thanks to goobering's link in his comment.

I downloaded get-pip.py from this section of the python website, then from terminal run sudo python get-pip.py.

Since pip is now working I then run sudo pip install netmiko and tested from Python: from netmiko import ConnectHandler

Full list of commands to get netmiko working on fresh Raspbian Jessy image:

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get upgrade
# sudo apt-get install gcc libffi-dev libssl-dev python-dev
# sudo pip install cryptography
# wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
# sudo python get-pip.py
# sudo pip install netmiko

Answer 2

I found the following commands were sufficient to fix my Raspbian Jessie install where Kodi was giving an error message about the old version of Python Cryptography.

sudo apt-get update  
sudo apt-get upgrade  
sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev python-dev  
sudo pip install setuptools  
sudo pip install cryptography

Answer 3

When using the follow above suggest commands to fix my Raspbian Jessy install of Kodi's error message on the Python Cryptography version error. I used this suggested Full list of commands to get netmiko working on fresh Raspbian Jessy image:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gcc libffi-dev libssl-dev python-dev
sudo pip install cryptography
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py
sudo pip install netmiko

But, I got back an error message stating that I needed an updated setuptools so on trying the last line. so I found the follow suggested code on another help thread and tried

sudo python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

and then

sudo pip install netmiko

this seemed to allowed netmiko to install and when I went into kodi I did not get the cryptography error.

Answer 4

if pip is not installed, first try sudo wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

after that, using sudo python get-pip.py install the pip. and then try sudo pip install netmiko