Do not use easy_install if you intend to use tiddywebplugins. Use pip instead.

If you are attempting to use easy_install and things are not working out, you may wish to use pip instead.

Required version of setuptools not available

Sometimes you may see an error like this:

But then, when you do what it says, the second time around you get the same error. If this happens check to see if you have two copies of easy_install on your system. You may have one in /usr/bin and another in /usr/local/bin. You need to use whichever is newer (most likely the one in /usr/local/bin/):

Setuptools installed but easy_install not found

If you have installed setuptools to get easy_install but your system still complains about it not being found there are two likely scenarios:

• It was installed to somewhere like /usr/local/bin and that directory is not in your PATH.
  
• It was installed to somewhere weird like /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/bin. When you install setuptools it will indicate in the output where it has installed easy_install.
  
  

Problems Installing Prerequisites

The most significant benefit of using easy_install for installing TiddlyWeb is that it will attempt to automatically install the Python parts of the TiddlyWeb Requirements. Sometimes, however, this process will fail and easy_install will not report these problems with much clarity. If your TiddlyWeb instance fails to start because of a missing dependency, you can try to use easy_install to install just that one package. Any failure will be a bit easier to extract from the output.

If you are unable to resolve that failure, try Getting Help

Unable to Get Source Files

Sometimes easy_install doesn't do the job, because of network issues either local to the running easy_install or at the source of the packages being installed (some packages are hosted on http://pypi.python.org/ some are hosted on their own sites). So sometimes when trying easy_install it will hang while trying to fetch something. The way to resolve this is to manually download the respective dependency's tarball and install it (which is what easy_install would do anyway), but using a tarball located elsewhere. Here's an example, getting the resolver package:

• google for "python resolver tar" - which led to a reliable source, the pypi repo itself
  
• grab it http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/r/resolver/resolver-0.2.1.tar.gz#md5=3a74a03ac19ec05f1f33d4fe34dd1d3f
  
• extract it tar zxvf resolver-0.2.1.tar.gz#md5\=3a74a03ac19ec05f1f33d4fe34dd1d3f
  
• install it cd resolver-0.2.1 ; python setup.py install
  

Then can go back and run easy_install -u tiddlyweb again and it will proceed to the next step.