Error during pip install -r requirements.txt due to "-e ."

Question

I'm encountering an issue while trying to install the dependencies for my Python project using pip install -r requirements.txt.

The error I'm receiving: It's due to -e . present in requirements.txt

  × python setup.py egg_info did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [3 lines of output]
      error in ML_Project setup command: 'install_requires' must be a string or list of strings containing valid project/version requirement specifiers; Expected package name at the start of dependency specifier
          -e .
          ^
      [end of output]

  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: metadata-generation-failed

× Encountered error while generating package metadata.
╰─> See above for output.

note: This is an issue with the package mentioned above, not pip.
hint: See above for details

and this is what my requirements.txt looks like:

pandas
numpy
seaborn

-e .

this is my setup.py:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages
from typing import List

HYPEN_E_DOT = "-e ."

def get_requirements(file_path: str) -> List[str]:
    '''
    This function will return the list of requirements from the requirements.txt file
    '''
    requirements = []
    with open(file_path) as file_obj:
        requirements = file_obj.readlines()
        requirements = [req.replace("\n", " ") for req in requirements]

        if HYPEN_E_DOT in requirements:
            requirements.remove(HYPEN_E_DOT)

    return requirements
    

setup(
name='ML_Project',
version='0.0.1',
author='author',
author_email= '[email protected]',
packages=find_packages(),
install_requires= get_requirements('requirements.txt')

)

I looked the solution online but everywhere it suggests to remove "-e ." I want to keep "-e ." in setup.py.

Answer 1

The error is basically coming because in requirements.txt file you have placed a traling extra space after "-e .". remove that extra space and it will work perfectly.