pip is showing error 'lsb_release -a' returned non-zero exit status 1

Question

I am trying to install packages using pip and it is throwing error.

Command that I have used,

sudo pip install selenium

The error

Answer 1

I had the same problem on a shared hosting account which is very limiting (I was installing python and pip for my user only). Their lsb_release -a returns something non-standard and I cannot change it. I solved the issue by editing distro.py (in your case: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/distro.py) and changing the default parameter of __init__ method. In my version it was at the line 545. Snippet:

def __init__(self,
    include_lsb=True,
    os_release_file='',
    distro_release_file=''):

Just change include_lsb=True to include_lsb=False.