Troubleshooting the esig Installation

If you find yourself on this page, you may well have been directed to visit by the installer. Here, we detail and provide solutions to a number of commonly occurring problems that you may find when attempting to install and use the esig package. Compiling and ensuring that esig works correctly on a wide range of platforms is not trivial – a lot of work has gone into ensuring it works on the greatest number of systems as possible. However, bad things can happen. Hopefully this page will be able to resolve your problem – if not, feel free to contact one of the team listed on The esig Python Package.

Unknown Command bdist_wheel

When compiling from source, you may find that the installer fails stating that the command bdist_wheel is not a valid command. This is because your setuptools package is out of date, and/or you do not have the wheel package installed.

To fix this problem, run the following commands. If you are using virtual environments, ensure you have activated your virtual environments beforehand.

$ pip install setuptools --upgrade
$ pip install wheel --upgrade

These commands should fix the problem, and esig should then install without problem.

Permission Denied when Installing

When installing esig, you recieve a Permission Denied error. This means that copying package files to the appropriate location failed as your account didn’t have sufficient privileges to do so. This will happen when you attempt to install esig globally for your Python installation. You can do this by running the pip install esig command with elevated privileges (e.g. sudo pip install esig on macOS/Linux, or running the command in a Windows Command Prompt with elevated privileges). However, we recommened that you use Python virtual environments, and install esig to one of those.

Can’t Load Boost libraries

If you attempt to import esig when running Python and you find an error stating that certain libraries cannot be imported, you’ve most likely installed libraries that esig are dependent upon in a non-standard location. The solution to this problem is to add the paths to the required libraries to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, on Linux or macOS respectively. Windows users will not run into this problem.

numpy error

We’re working on finding a solution for this problem.