virtualenv hung up on installing setuptools

Use the -v switch to get Verbose output.

For me, it was a network connection. Specifically, the server I was trying to use virtualenv on was firewalled from the Internet and I needed to get out thru a proxy. Except, that virtualenv doesn't seem to honor the proxy settings in the environment and it has no commandline switch.

So use pip to pre-cache/pre-download the 3 needed packages:

sudo pip download setuptools pip wheel --proxy http://<yourproxyhere>

Then you can run virtualenv and it will use the cached packages that you just downloaded.

I was using pipenv to install a venv :

$ pipenv installCreating a virtualenv for this project…Pipfile: /home/seba/Sources/neogeo/grandlyon/photon-setup/PipfileUsing /usr/bin/python3 (3.6.7) to create virtualenv…⠦ Creating virtual environment...

Verbose mode didn't give me more information, --clear was useless but using ps auxf I saw the oython process was waiting for nothing:

 [...] S+   09:59   0:00  |   |       \_ /home/seba/Sources/neogeo/grandlyon/photon-setup/venv/bin/python3 - setuptools pip wheel

It stalled installing setuptools.

Creating a virtualenv as usual confirmed me this:

$ virtualenv -vv --python=python3 venv[...]Running command /home/seba/Sources/n...tup/venv/bin/python3 - setuptools pip wheelLooking in links: /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/virtualenv_supportCollecting setuptools[Waiting forever]

The fix was dropping pip cache:

$ rm -Rf ~/.cache/pip/ ~/.cache/pip-tools/

I ran into this as well and none of the answers above worked. Turned out to be a bad cache entry.

With $ virtualenv -vv venv I'd get output ending with:

Running command /Users/ghartmann/cod...test/venv/bin/python - setuptools pip wheelCollecting setuptools    Cache entry deserialization failed, entry ignored

It would block there and then when you interrupted you'd see the stack indicating it was blocked downloading the wheel package.

On macos the pip cache is here: ~/Library/Caches/pip.
Removing that directory fixed the issue, as it was able to reinitialize the cache.