Compiling Python package with C extension on Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2017

Posted on | Comments:
Symbols count in article: 3.2k | Reading time ≈ 3 mins.

Anaconda3 used to work flawlessly when installing Python packages that requires C extension with Visual Studio 2015 installed. However, since Visual Studio 2017 no longer include the C++ CLI compilation tools under PATH, errors like below appears when trying to install a TPyhon package that requires compilation of native extension.

error: command ‘cl.exe’ failed: No such file or directory

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
C:\Users\mengx>pip install fasttext --no-cache-dir
Collecting fasttext
  Downloading fasttext-0.8.3.tar.gz (73kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 81kB 544kB/s
Requirement already satisfied: numpy>=1 in c:\users\mengx\anaconda3\lib\site-packages (from fasttext)
Requirement already satisfied: future in c:\users\mengx\anaconda3\lib\site-packages (from fasttext)
Installing collected packages: fasttext
  Running setup.py install for fasttext ... error
    Complete output from command C:\Users\mengx\Anaconda3\python.exe -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='C:\\Users\\mengx\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\pip-build-px7rnk37\\fasttext\\setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, 'exec'))" install --record C:\Users\mengx\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-z__vaqt_-record\install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
    running install
    running build
    running build_py
    creating build
    creating build\lib.win-amd64-3.6
    creating build\lib.win-amd64-3.6\fasttext
    copying fasttext\model.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.6\fasttext
    copying fasttext\__init__.py -> build\lib.win-amd64-3.6\fasttext
    running build_ext
    building 'fasttext.fasttext' extension
    creating build\temp.win-amd64-3.6
    creating build\temp.win-amd64-3.6\Release
    creating build\temp.win-amd64-3.6\Release\fasttext
    creating build\temp.win-amd64-3.6\Release\fasttext\cpp
    creating build\temp.win-amd64-3.6\Release\fasttext\cpp\src
    cl.exe /c /nologo /Ox /W3 /GL /DNDEBUG /MD -IC:\Users\mengx\Anaconda3\include -IC:\Users\mengx\Anaconda3\include /EHsc /Tpfasttext/fasttext.cpp /Fobuild\temp.win-amd64-3.6\Release\fasttext/fasttext.obj -O3 -pthread -funroll-loops -std=c++0x
    error: command 'cl.exe' failed: No such file or directory

    ----------------------------------------
Command "C:\Users\mengx\Anaconda3\python.exe -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='C:\\Users\\mengx\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\pip-build-px7rnk37\\fasttext\\setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, 'exec'))" install --record C:\Users\mengx\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-z__vaqt_-record\install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in C:\Users\mengx\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-px7rnk37\fasttext\

Here’s a rather easy fix:

  1. Ensure that compiler tools are installed. You can do that by running Visual Studio Installer.
vsinstaller
  1. Open x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2017
  1. Run pip install inside this command prompt