I’m running into trouble while setting up pycurl in my virtual environment through pip. The installation process throws this specific error message:
ImportError: pycurl: libcurl link-time ssl backend (openssl) is different from compile-time ssl backend (none/other)
From what I understand after checking various forums, this happens because there’s a mismatch between the SSL backend that was used during compilation and the one that’s being used at runtime. The solution apparently involves configuring the SSL backend properly during the setup process.
Since I’m using pip for installation rather than building from source directly, I’m not sure how to pass the necessary SSL backend configuration. What’s the correct way to handle this SSL backend specification when installing through pip? Any help would be appreciated.
This error typically occurs when your system’s libcurl was compiled with a different SSL backend than what pycurl expects. I encountered this exact issue on Ubuntu when switching between different Python environments. The most reliable solution is to reinstall pycurl with explicit SSL backend specification. First, uninstall the existing pycurl installation completely. Then reinstall using pip with the PYCURL_SSL_LIBRARY environment variable set to match your system’s libcurl configuration. For OpenSSL systems, use: PYCURL_SSL_LIBRARY=openssl pip install pycurl. You can verify your libcurl’s SSL backend by running curl-config --feature | grep SSL in your terminal. If the environment variable approach fails, installing libcurl development headers for your specific SSL backend before reinstalling pycurl usually resolves the mismatch.
hmm interesting - are you maybe using conda alongside pip? i’ve seen this exact issue when conda’s libcurl conflicts with system version. what happens if you check which curl and curl --version first? sometimes the problem is having multiple curl installations fighting eachother
had similar headache last month. try building pycurl from source instead of pip - download the tarball and use python setup.py install --with-openssl during compilation. this forces it to use openssl backend properly. worked for me when pip kept failing