Why did Stellargraph could install when I updated pip?

Question

I tried to install stellargraph in a Python 3.6.13 venv. It threw the following error:

Then I ran pip install --upgrade pip and re-ran the installation. It worked. I want to understand why upgrading pip was the game changer. The error related to TensorFlow had nothing to do with it.

Answer 1

It is pretty self-explanatory from your console output. stellargraph needs tensorflow>=2.1.0 which isn't not supported by your pip version 18.1.

So when you updated pip to 21.0.1, it could find a successful distribution of tensorflow (>2.1.0) and could therefore install stellargraph in the correct manner.