Error installing pip pyicu

Question

I have been trying to install musicbrainz server on my mac and there is a step where I have to install pip pyicu. I keep getting this error:

Collecting pyicu         


        

Answer 1

It seems like the current version of icu4c packaged for brew does not link the icu-config file properly.

Running brew link icu4c --force gives you the necessary information to address this, but fails to link it automatically.

$ brew link --force icu4c
Warning: Refusing to link macOS-provided software: icu4c
If you need to have icu4c first in your PATH run:
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/sbin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

For compilers to find icu4c you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/icu4c/include"

For pkg-config to find icu4c you may need to set:
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib/pkgconfig"

You need to run the following after installing icu4c through brew to get icu-config into your path (assuming you're running bash as your shell):

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

After that, you should be able to install pyicu without any additional environment variables:

$ pip install --no-cache-dir pyicu
Collecting pyicu
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/c2/15/0af20b540c828943b6ffea5677c86e908dcac108813b522adebb75c827c1/PyICU-2.2.tar.gz (211kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 215kB 4.9MB/s 
Installing collected packages: pyicu
  Running setup.py install for pyicu ... done
Successfully installed pyicu-2.2

In summary, here's a complete list of commands i ran to make this work:

brew install icu4c
brew link icu4c --force
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/icu4c/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile
pip install --no-cache-dir pyicu

(As an aside, many of the solutions i came across do not use the --no-cache-dir option with pip install. I think some of them may have cached built version of pyicu. I did for a while, which masked the issue. It wasn't until i tried this option that i was able to reproduce and fix appropriately.)