Why can't I get `pip install lxml` to work within a virtualenv on raspberry pi

Question

It keeps freezing or gives me the

'arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc': error.

Answer 1

One option is to just use the packaged versions of the lxml module.

If you're on Python 3:

apt-get install python3-lxml

Or on Python 2:

apt-get install python-lxml

If you create your virtualenv with --system-site-packages, you will have access to this install of lxml from the virtualenv.

I'm running Raspbian Stretch on my Pi, and it looks like pip install grabs a binary build (so no gcc required):

(venv) pi@lbb:~ $ pip install lxml
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple
Collecting lxml
ww  Downloading https://www.piwheels.org/simple/lxml/lxml-4.2.1-cp35-cp35m-linux_armv7l.whl (4.9MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 4.9MB 1.0MB/s 
Installing collected packages: lxml
Successfully installed lxml-4.2.1

Are you running the same distribution on your Pi? If not, please update your question to include that information.