Modulenotfounderror no module named requests windows

A common error you may encounter when using Python is modulenotfounderror: no module named ‘requests’. This error occurs when Python cannot detect the Requests library in your current environment. Requests does not come with the default Python installation. This tutorial goes through the exact steps to troubleshoot this error for the Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

ModuleNotFoundError: no module named ‘requests’

What is ModuleNotFoundError?

The ModuleNotFoundError occurs when the module you want to use is not present in your Python environment. There are several causes of the modulenotfounderror:

The module’s name is incorrect, in which case you have to check the name of the module you tried to import. Let’s try to import the re module with a double e to see what happens:

import ree

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ModuleNotFoundError                       Traceback (most recent call last)
1 import ree

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ree'

To solve this error, ensure the module name is correct. Let’s look at the revised code:

import re

print(re.__version__)

2.2.1

You may want to import a local module file, but the module is not in the same directory. Let’s look at an example package with a script and a local module to import. Let’s look at the following steps to perform from your terminal:

mkdir example_package

cd example_package

mkdir folder_1

cd folder_1

vi module.py

Note that we use Vim to create the module.py file in this example. You can use your preferred file editor, such as Emacs or Atom. In module.py, we will import the re module and define a simple function that prints the re version:

import re

def print_re_version():

    print(re.__version__)

Close the module.py, then complete the following commands from your terminal:

cd ../

vi script.py

Inside script.py, we will try to import the module we created.

import module

if __name__ == '__main__':

    mod.print_re_version()

Let’s run python script.py from the terminal to see what happens:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "script.py", line 1, in <module>
    import module
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'module'

To solve this error, we need to point to the correct path to module.py, which is inside folder_1. Let’s look at the revised code:

import folder_1.module as mod

if __name__ == '__main__':

    mod.print_re_version()

When we run python script.py, we will get the following result:

2.2.1

Lastly, you can encounter the modulenotfounderror when you import a module that is not installed in your Python environment. The simplest way to install requests is to use the package manager for Python called pip. The following instructions are for the major Python version 3.

What is requests?

Requests is an HTTP library for Python. Requests allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests. Requests does not automatically come installed with Python.

How to install requests on Windows Operating System

You can install pip on Windows by downloading the installation package, opening the command line and launching the installer. You can install pip via the CMD prompt by running the following command.

python get-pip.py

You may need to run the command prompt as administrator. Check whether the installation has been successful by typing.

pip --version

To install requests with pip, run the following command from the command prompt.

pip3 install requests

How to install requests on Mac Operating System

Open a terminal by pressing command (⌘) + Space Bar to open the Spotlight search. Type in terminal and press enter. To get pip, first ensure you have installed Python3:

python3 --version

Python 3.8.8

Download pip by running the following curl command:

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

The curl command allows you to specify a direct download link. Using the -o option sets the name of the downloaded file.

Install pip by running:

python3 get-pip.py

From the terminal, use pip3 to install requests:

pip3 install requests

How to install requests on Linux Operating System

All major Linux distributions have Python installed by default. However, you will need to install pip. You can install pip from the terminal, but the installation instructions depend on the Linux distribution you are using. You will need root privileges to install pip. Open a terminal and use the commands relevant to your Linux distribution to install pip.

Installing pip for Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint

sudo apt install python-pip3

Installing pip for CentOS 8 (and newer), Fedora, and Red Hat

sudo dnf install python-pip3

Installing pip for CentOS 6 and 7, and older versions of Red Hat

sudo yum install epel-release

sudo yum install python-pip3

Installing pip for Arch Linux and Manjaro

sudo pacman -S python-pip

Installing pip for OpenSUSE

sudo zypper python3-pip

Once you have installed pip, you can install requests using:

pip3 install requests

Check requests Version

Once you have successfully installed requests, you can use two methods to check the version of requests. First, you can use pip show from your terminal.

pip show requests

Name: requests
Version: 2.25.1
Summary: Python HTTP for Humans.
Home-page: https://requests.readthedocs.io
Author: Kenneth Reitz
Author-email: [email protected]
License: Apache 2.0
Location: /Users/Yusufu.Shehu/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages
Requires: urllib3, chardet, idna, certifi
Required-by: tensorboard, Sphinx, requests-oauthlib, jupyterlab-server, conda, conda-repo-cli, conda-build, anaconda-project, anaconda-client

Second, within your python program, you can import requests and then reference the __version__ attribute:

import requests

print(requests.__version__)

2.25.1

Installing requests Using Anaconda

Anaconda is a distribution of Python and R for scientific computing and data science. You can install Anaconda by going to the installation instructions. Once you have installed Anaconda, you can install requests using the following command:

conda install -c anaconda requests

Summary

Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial. The modulenotfounderror occurs if you misspell the module name, incorrectly point to the module path or do not have the module installed in your Python environment. If you do not have the module installed in your Python environment, you can use pip to install the package. However, you must ensure you have pip installed on your system. You can also install Anaconda on your system and use the conda install command to install the requests library.

For further reading on ModuleNotFoundErrors, go to the article: How to Solve Python ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘ConfigParser’.

Go to the online courses page on Python to learn more about Python for data science and machine learning.

Have fun and happy researching!

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

Problem Formulation

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

import requests

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

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

Solution Idea 1: Install Library requests

The most likely reason is that Python doesn’t provide requests in its standard library. You need to install it first!

Before being able to import the Requests module, you need to install it using Python’s package manager pip. Make sure pip is installed on your machine.

To fix this error, you can run the following command in your Windows shell:

$ pip install requests

This simple command installs requests in your virtual environment on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It assumes that your pip version is updated. If it isn’t, use the following two commands in your terminal, command line, or shell (there’s no harm in doing it anyways):

$ python -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ pip install requests

💡 Note: Don’t copy and paste the $ symbol. This is just to illustrate that you run it in your shell/terminal/command line.

Solution Idea 2: Fix the Path

The error might persist even after you have installed the requests library. This likely happens because pip is installed but doesn’t reside in the path you can use. Although pip may be installed on your system the script is unable to locate it. Therefore, it is unable to install the library using pip in the correct path.

To fix the problem with the path in Windows follow the steps given next.

Step 1: Open the folder where you installed Python by opening the command prompt and typing where python

Step 2: Once you have opened the Python folder, browse and open the Scripts folder and copy its location. Also verify that the folder contains the pip file.

Step 3: Now open the Scripts directory in the command prompt using the cd command and the location that you copied previously.

Step 4: Now install the library using pip install requests command. Here’s an analogous example:

After having followed the above steps, execute our script once again. And you should get the desired output.

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 requests for Python 3, you may want to try python3 -m pip install requests or even pip3 install requests instead of pip install requests
• If you face this issue server-side, you may want to try the command pip install --user requests
• If you’re using Ubuntu, you may want to try this command: sudo apt install requests
• You can check out our in-depth guide on installing requests 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 requests

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., requests) 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:

How to Fix “ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘requests’” in PyCharm

If you create a new Python project in PyCharm and try to import the requests library, it’ll raise the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/.../main.py", line 1, in <module>
    import requests
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'requests'

Process finished with exit code 1

The reason is that each PyCharm project, per default, creates a virtual environment in which you can install custom Python modules. But the virtual environment is initially empty—even if you’ve already installed requests on your computer!

Here’s a screenshot exemplifying this for the pandas library. It’ll look similar for requests.

The fix is simple: Use the PyCharm installation tooltips to install Pandas in your virtual environment—two clicks and you’re good to go!

First, right-click on the pandas (in your case: requests) text in your editor:

Second, click “Show Context Actions” in your context menu. In the new menu that arises, click “Install Requests” and wait for PyCharm to finish the installation.

The code will run after your installation completes successfully.

As an alternative, you can also open the Terminal tool at the bottom and type:

$ pip install requests

If this doesn’t work, you may want to set the Python interpreter to another version using the following tutorial: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.1/configuring-python-interpreter-for-a-project.html

You can also manually install a new library such as requests in PyCharm using the following procedure:

• Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
• Select your current project.
• Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
• Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
• Now type in the library to be installed, in your example Requests, and click Install Package.
• Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s an analogous example:

Here’s a full guide on how to install a library on PyCharm.

• How to Install a Library on PyCharm

Errors are an inevitable part of programming, and every programmer will encounter them at some point in their career.

Errors in programming can take various forms, including syntax errors, logic errors, and runtime errors, and they can have a significant impact on the functioning of a program.

Understanding the different types of errors in programming and learning how to identify and fix them is essential for writing robust and reliable code.

In this regard, various tools, such as debuggers, profilers, and automated testing frameworks can help you detect and fix errors more efficiently.

In this quick tutorial, we’ll look at a specific Python error – the «ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'requests'» error – to see what causes it and how to fix it.

The ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'requests' error occurs when you try to import the requests module in your Python code but the module is not installed or not available in the current environment.

This error is commonly encountered when using Python Django because the requests module is often used for making HTTP requests in Django applications.

How to Fix the ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'requests' Error in Python

To solve this error, you can follow these steps:

First, check if the requests module is installed. Open a terminal or command prompt and enter the following command:

pip freeze | grep requests

This command will search for the requests module in your environment and print its version number if it is installed. If nothing is printed, it means that the module is not installed.

If the requests module is not installed, you can install it by running the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

pip install requests

This command will download and install the requests module and all its dependencies.

Then you’ll need to check if the requests module was imported correctly. Once the requests module is installed, you can import it in your Python code using the following statement:

import requests

Make sure that this statement is placed at the top of your Python file before any other statements that use the requests module.

Finally, if you are using the requests module in a Python Django application, you may need to restart your server after installing the module to ensure that the changes take effect.

Wrapping Up

By following these steps, you should be able to solve the ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'requests' error and use the requests module in your Python Django application.

And that is it!

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Happy Coding!

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