How do I fix 'ImportError: cannot import name IncompleteRead'?

While this previous answer might be the reason, this snipped worked for me as a solution (in Ubuntu 14.04):

First remove the package from the package manager:

# apt-get remove python-pip

And then install the latest version by side:

# easy_install pip

(thanks to @Aufziehvogel, @JunchaoGu)

This problem is caused by a mismatch between your pip installation and your requests installation.

As of requests version 2.4.0 requests.compat.IncompleteRead has been removed. Older versions of pip, e.g. from July 2014, still relied on IncompleteRead. In the current version of pip, the import of IncompleteRead has been removed.

So the one to blame is either:

• requests, for removing public API too quickly
• Ubuntu for updating pip too slowly

You can solve this issue, by either updating pip via Ubuntu (if there is a newer version) or by installing pip aside from Ubuntu.

For fixing pip3 (worked on Ubuntu 14.10):

easy_install3 -U pip

Or you can remove all requests.

For example:

• rm -rf /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests*

On Ubuntu 14.04 I resolved this by using the pip installation bootstrap script, as described in the documentation

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py

That's an OK solution for a development environment.