What does “error: option --single-version-externally-managed not recognized” indicate?

Question

I seem to have suddenly started encounter the error error: option --single-version-externally-managed not recognized when pip installing varions pa

Answer 1

I was having this problem. It turned out it was a problem with the file permissions on my pip cache.

If you see a message at the very beginning of your pip output like

The directory '/home/ubuntu/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
The directory '/home/ubuntu/.cache/pip' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and caching wheels has been disabled. check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.

you might have the same problem. You can resolve it by either ensuring that you have proper file permissions on your pip cache (something like chown -R $(whoami) /home/ubuntu/.cache/pip) or, if you're on a UNIX, you can set the pip cache location with the XDG_CACHE_HOME env var to some folder you do own.