(Fixed) No Module Named ‘Pip’ Error

Quick Fix: Python raises the ImportError: No module named 'pip' when it cannot find the library pip. The most frequent source of this error is that you haven’t installed pip. Alternatively, you may have different Python versions on your computer, and pip is not installed for the particular version you’re using.

I have compiled the following commands from various sources online — choose the one that applies to you – this should fix ~80% of the issues:

# 👇 For Python 3 (Linux with apt) 
sudo apt install python3-pip

# 👇 For Python 2 (Linux with apt)
sudo apt install python-pip

# 👇 For Python 3 (macOS, Win)
python3 -m ensurepip

# 👇 For Python 3 (macOS, Win) 
python3 -m pip

# 👇 For Python 3 (macOS)
brew install python

# 👇 For Python 2 (macOS)
python2.7 -m ensurepip --default-pip

# 👇 For Python 3 (macOS)
python3 -m ensurepip --default-pip

# 👇 After installing ez_setup
easy_install pip

Problem Formulation

You’ve just learned about the awesome capabilities of the pip library and you want to try it out, so you start your code with the following statement:

import pip

This is supposed to import the Pandas library into your (virtual) environment. However, it only throws the following ImportError: No module named pip:

>>> import pip
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    import pip
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip'

Please note that there are many other ways this error may occur (e.g., when attempting to install a library using pip in your shell or terminal). Try the commands suggested at the beginning. ✅

Solution Idea 1: Install Pip (Windows)

Download get-pip.py file in the desired folder, open the command prompt and navigate to the location of the downloaded file and install PIP using the following command :

python get-pip.py

✅ Recommended: How To Install pip On Windows?

If you want to install pip, also make sure to check out my in-depth guide:

✅ Recommended: How To Install pip? 5 Easy Steps

Other Solution Ideas

• The ModuleNotFoundError may appear due to relative imports. You can learn everything about relative imports and how to create your own module in this article.
• You may have mixed up Python and pip versions on your machine. In this case, to install pip for Python 3, you may want to try python3 -m pip ... or even pip3 install ... instead of pip install ...
• If you face this issue server-side, you may want to try the command pip install --user ...
• If you’re using Ubuntu, you may want to try this command: sudo apt install pip
• You can check out our in-depth guide on installing pip here.
• You can also check out this article to learn more about possible problems that may lead to an error when importing a library.

Understanding the “import” Statement

import pip

In Python, the import statement serves two main purposes:

• Search the module by its name, load it, and initialize it.
• Define a name in the local namespace within the scope of the import statement. This local name is then used to reference the accessed module throughout the code.

What’s the Difference Between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

What’s the difference between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

Python defines an error hierarchy, so some error classes inherit from other error classes. In our case, the ModuleNotFoundError is a subclass of the ImportError class.

You can see this in this screenshot from the docs:

You can also check this relationship using the issubclass() built-in function:

>>> issubclass(ModuleNotFoundError, ImportError)
True

Specifically, Python raises the ModuleNotFoundError if the module (e.g., pip) cannot be found. If it can be found, there may be a problem loading the module or some specific files within the module. In those cases, Python would raise an ImportError.

If an import statement cannot import a module, it raises an ImportError. This may occur because of a faulty installation or an invalid path. In Python 3.6 or newer, this will usually raise a ModuleNotFoundError.

Related Videos

The following video shows you how to resolve the ImportError:

The following video shows you how to import a function from another folder—doing it the wrong way often results in the ModuleNotFoundError:

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