pip broke. how to fix DistributionNotFound error?

I find this problem in my MacBook, the reason is because as @Stephan said, I use easy_install to install pip, and the mixture of both py package manage tools led to the pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound problem. The resolve is:

easy_install --upgrade pip

Remember: just use one of the above tools to manage your Py packages.

I replaced 0.8.1 in 0.8.2 in /usr/local/bin/pip and everything worked again.

__requires__ = 'pip==0.8.2'
import sys
from pkg_resources import load_entry_point

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(
        load_entry_point('pip==0.8.2', 'console_scripts', 'pip')()
    )

I installed pip through easy_install which probably caused me this headache. I think this is how you should do it nowadays..

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev build-essential 
$ sudo pip install --upgrade pip 
$ sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv

I had this issue when I was using homebrew. Here is the solution from Issue #26900

python -m pip install --upgrade --force pip