Ubuntu 16: pip install installs to python 3 instead of 2

Question

I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04. I know it came with only python 3 installed, but somehow python 2 got in there ( I guess as a dependency). That's ok because i would add it anyway. Both python versions are present as can be seen with:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.11+
$ python3 --version
Python 3.5.1+

My problem is that pip and pip3 both default to python3 (and there's no pip2 either). For example:

$ sudo -H pip install numpy
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): numpy in /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages
$ sudo -H pip3 install numpy
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): numpy in /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages

For what it's worth they are referring to different fodlers:

$ which pip
/usr/local/bin/pip
$ which pip3
/usr/local/bin/pip3

How do I make pip install to python2 and pip3 install to python3 like in Ubuntu 14.04?

Answer 1

after installing both

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-pip

under Ubuntu 16.04 I can simply use

pip2 install module
pip3 install module

to install the desired module for Python2 or Python3, respectively.

I hope that is helpful and works for you, too!

Answer 2

Face same issue solved by unlinking pip from python3 by reinstalling it as following:

sudo python -m pip install -U --force-reinstall pip

Answer 3

I found a way that works, and hopefully I didn't break anything in the process. At first I tried editing the first line in /usr/local/bin/pip to change it from python 3 to python 2 compiler but got error that there was no module named pip !?

So I thought maybe I need install it for python 2. So I went there and saved the get-pip.py script they offered. There is a warning that it might break stuff for the OS but since xenial uses only python3 I decided to risk it. And it worked:

$ sudo -H pip install numpy
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): numpy in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
$ sudo -H pip3 install numpy
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): numpy in /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages

There is still the potential problem that stuff are in /usr/local that muru mentioned but I don't know much about it and if stuff keep working I will not complain. The only ways I ve added packages are apt-get and some .deb files in rare exceptions (like chrome iirc).

Answer 4

I know this is an old thread but since none of the answers fixed the issue for me and I could not find any other solution online I thought I would share what finally worked for me.

Running these two lines corrected the problem for me and now pip installs modules for python2

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/pip/2.7/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

python get-pip.py