Failed to install Python Cryptography package with PIP and setup.py

I had a similar issue, and found I was simply missing a dependency (libssl-dev, for me). As referenced in https://cryptography.io/en/latest/installation/, ensure that all dependencies are met:

On Windows

If you’re on Windows you’ll need to make sure you have OpenSSL installed. There are pre-compiled binaries available. If your installation is in an unusual location set the LIB and INCLUDE environment variables to include the corresponding locations. For example:

C:\> \path\to\vcvarsall.bat x86_amd64
C:\> set LIB=C:\OpenSSL-1.0.1f-64bit\lib;%LIB%
C:\> set INCLUDE=C:\OpenSSL-1.0.1f-64bit\include;%INCLUDE%
C:\> pip install cryptography

Building cryptography on Linux

cryptography should build very easily on Linux provided you have a C compiler, headers for Python (if you’re not using pypy), and headers for the OpenSSL and libffi libraries available on your system.

For Debian and Ubuntu, the following command will ensure that the required dependencies are installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev

For Fedora and RHEL-derivatives, the following command will ensure that the required dependencies are installed:

sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel python-devel OpenSSL-devel

You should now be able to build and install cryptography with the usual.

pip install cryptography

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This is a condensed version of the information found on cryptography's installation docs page. Consult that page for the latest details.

Since this SO question keeps coming up I'll drop a response here too (I am one of the pyca/cryptography developers). Here's what you need to reliably install pyca/cryptography on the 3 major platforms.

Please note in all these cases it is highly recommended that you install into a virtualenv and not into the global package space. This is not specific to cryptography but rather is generic advice to keep your Python installation reliable. The global package space in OS provided Pythons is owned by the system and installing things via pip into it is asking for trouble.

Windows

Upgrade to the latest pip and just pip install cryptography

cryptography and cffi are both shipped as statically linked wheels.

macOS (OS X)

Upgrade to the latest pip and just pip install cryptography

cryptography and cffi are both shipped as statically linked wheels. This will work for pyenv Python, system Python, homebrew Python, etc. As long as you're on the latest pip you won't even need a compiler.

Linux

Users with the latest pip (upgrade!) running on a glibc-based or musl-based distribution and on x86/x86-64/aarch64 no longer need a compiler or headers because you'll get a precompiled wheel automatically. So, first thing you should try is upgrading your pip and installing the latest cryptography version as older versions don't get newer wheel types.

If you aren't manylinux/musllinux compatible or wish to compile against your own OpenSSL then here's what you need to do:

You'll need a C compiler, a Rust compiler, libffi + its development headers, and openssl + its development headers.

Debian or Ubuntu derived distributions

apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev followed by

pip install cryptography

Red Hat derived distributions

yum install gcc openssl-devel libffi-devel python-devel followed by

pip install cryptography

Note that as of version 3.4 cryptography now requires a Rust compiler at build time (not at runtime) so you will additionally need Rust >= 1.41.0. Check your distribution's rust or install it via rustup

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For those of you running OS X, here is what worked for me:

brew install openssl
env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib" CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"
pip install cryptography

(Running 10.9 Mavericks)

You may also want to try merging the flags and pip commands to the following per the comment below:

brew install openssl
env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib" CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include" pip install cryptography

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This worked for me in El Capitan

brew install pkg-config libffi openssl
env LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib" CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include" pip install cryptography

You can also check the thread here : https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/2350

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This solved the problem for me (Ubuntu 16.04):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev python3-dev

and then it was working like this:

pip install cryptography
pip install pyopenssl ndg-httpsclient pyasn1

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Apparently on recent versions of OSX this may be caused by Apple shipping their own version of OpenSSL, which doesn't work with the cryptography library.

Recent versions of the cryptography library ship with their own native dependencies, but to get them you'll need to upgrade pip, and possibly also virtual env. So for me, the solution was:

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall pip virtualenv

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I tried many solutions above, but only after the installation of the following lib I could install cryptography:

sudo apt install libssl1.0

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, but it will work on Ubuntu 18.10 as well.

UPD: To solve this error on Ubuntu 20 I had to replace cryptography==1.9 with cryptography==2.1.1

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How I solved "Failed cleaning build dir for cryptography" (I came here from google to result for this error.)

note: using a virtualenv

TL;DR:

my file /etc/apt/sources.list wasn't correctly configured for my debian 8.

Explanations:

I wanted to install paramiko. paramiko needs cryptography.

I got these errors: first with pip install cryptography:

(...)
  ----------------------------------------
  Failed cleaning build dir for cryptography
Failed to build cryptography
(...)
    ----------------------------------------
Command "/home/myuser/pyenvs/testo/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-HXWKAO/cryptography/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-WjqY6V-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile --install-headers /home/myuser/pyenvs/testo/include/site/python2.7/cryptography" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-HXWKAO/cryptography/

and then with sudo apt-get install build-essential :

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 build-essential : Depends: libc6-dev but it is not going to be installed > or
                            libc-dev
                   Depends: gcc (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
                   Depends: g++ (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

(Not exactly the same errors as OP but I'm here to help eventually)

Solving:

After testing almost every command from every posts I end up going on
https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList
and copy pasted my adequate config in the file /etc/apt/sources.list

then:

sudo aptitude update

and then

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev

and then

pip install cryptography

hth

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This worked for me (I'm using Ubuntu 14.04):

first install libffi-dev libssl-dev libpython2.7-dev:

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev libpython2.7-dev

then inside virtualenv:

pip install cryptography
pip install pyopenssl ndg-httpsclient pyasn1

Sources:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32800685/5123544

https://stackoverflow.com/a/29202163/5123544

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Nick Woodham's answer didn't work on OSX 10.11 El Capitan for me, but this did.

brew install openssl
CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include" pip install cryptography==0.8

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In case that you are dockerizing your python application, your Dockerfile needs to have something like:

FROM python:3.7-alpine

RUN apk add --update alpine-sdk && apk add libffi-dev openssl-dev

RUN pip install cryptography

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If you are building a python package distribution in a .gitlab-ci.yml file in for GitLab CI that uses a gitlab runner deployed in an AWS EC2 machine

 - apk add --update alpine-sdk && \
 - apk add libffi-dev openssl-dev && \
 - apk --no-cache --update add build-base

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If you are using python3, you need to install python3-dev. This fixed my problem sudo apt-get install python3-dev.

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I was having issues with installing cryptography==1.7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 and none of the answers above helped. So, I upgraded the requirement to a compatible 1.8.2 and the setup was successful. Note that you would still need build essentials & other dependencies mentioned in the top (most upvoted) answer.

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I was having a problem running sudo pip install cryptography because it would not find ffi when trying to compile. (OSX - Yosemite)

I solved it by downloading libffi and setting up the env var.

$ brew install pkg-config libffi
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/libffi/3.0.13/lib/pkgconfig/
$ pip install cryptography

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I noticed the original poster was clearly using a windows installation... and the best answers above are all for other OSs... so here goes. This assumes you have installed Python 2.7 which is the most widely supported (though old) version.

Install the "Visual C++ Compiler for Python" Open an Administrative command prompt window Re-run pip install (package) e.g. cd C:\Python27\Scripts pip install cryptography (or pycrypto, fabric, etc)

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This works on El Capitan with MacPorts:

$ sudo port install openssl
$ env LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib" CFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include" pip install cryptography

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I encountered a similar issue recently. In my case the versions of cffi and cryptography written in requirements.txt weren't compatible (cffi==1.8.9 and cryptography==1.9). I solved updating cffi with the last available version.

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Upgrading pip version solved the problem

pip install --upgrade pip (for mac/linux distros)

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I actually ran into this same prob trying to install Scrapy which depends on cryptography being installed first. I'm on Win764-bit with Python 2.7 64-bit installed. @jsonm's answer eventually worked for me, but first I had to Copy C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\vcvarsx86_amd64.bat to the x86_amd64 subdir within that bin dir so the vcvarsall.bat would stop throwing an error saying it was missing the config. If you need to configure env vars for a different setup, be sure to copy to corresponding vcvars bat file to the corresponding subdir or the first command below might not work.

Then I ran the following from a commandline as per @jsonm's instructions (tweaked for my config)...

C:\> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x86_amd64 
C:\> set LIB=C:\OpenSSL-Win64\lib;%LIB% 
C:\> set INCLUDE=C:\OpenSSL-Win64\include;%INCLUDE% 
C:\> pip install cryptography

And it worked.

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I had this error too. After continuing to get this error even after installing openSSL, I eventually tried installing from wheel files from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cryptography/0.2.2#downloads. It worked!

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i downloaded paramiko full source code from pypi and did

python setup.py install

it worked flawlessly

all default pythondev / openssl /libffi packages are already present in rhel.

downloading rpms have rpm mismatch and more trouble

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you have to upgrade your pip before running your installation

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Use conda instead

None of the proposed solutions worked for me on Raspbian 10 (buster) so I just installed it via conda and voila:

conda install -c anaconda cryptography

P.S. : I know that the question mentions pip but I see that OP is using a conda installation so I thought of sharing this solution anyway. Nevertheless, since this problem is apparently OS-specific, it's meaningful to remind one that conda is a cross-platform solution which may also install necessary binaries apart from python packages - with just an one-liner.

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I am having same problem:

pip install cryptography

.
.
.
Installing collected packages: cffi, cryptography
     Running setup.py install for cffi ... error

Then I install libffi-devel and problem is solved

yum install libffi-devel

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Those two commands fixed it for me:

brew install openssl
brew link openssl --force

Source: https://github.com/phusion/passenger/issues/1630#issuecomment-147527656

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I resolved this by upgrading from cryptography 1.9 to 2.4.2

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Had same issue in Cygwin, this is what helped me

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev

but instead of sudo apt-get install, I installed those packages via Cygwin Source of this code

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In Debian 11 (and probably most new Linux distros):

sudo apt install python3-cryptography

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