UnicodeDecodeError installing legit from GitHub

[techtonik]

pip 1.5.4, python 2.7.6

> py -m pip install https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
Downloading/unpacking https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
Cleaning up...
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\basecommand.py", line 122, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\commands\install.py", line 278, in run
    requirement_set.prepare_files(finder, force_root_egg_info=self.bundle, bundle=self.bundle)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\req.py", line 1197, in prepare_files
    do_download,
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\req.py", line 1375, in unpack_url
    self.session,
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\download.py", line 582, in unpack_http_url
    unpack_file(temp_location, location, content_type, link)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\util.py", line 627, in unpack_file
    and is_svn_page(file_contents(filename))):
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip\util.py", line 210, in file_contents
    return fp.read().decode('utf-8')
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

[pwaller]

👍 encountered this over on pyfiglet.

[defance]

You shoud try:

py -m pip install git+https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit

[xavfernandez]

Yup, https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit is a link to a webpage, nothing much pip can do from it.
The error message is slightly better now:

$ pip install https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
Collecting https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
  Downloading https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
     | 61kB 436kB/s
  Cannot unpack file /tmp/pip-f5Htwo-unpack/legit (downloaded from /tmp/pip-vinjwI-build, content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8); cannot detect archive format
Cannot determine archive format of /tmp/pip-vinjwI-build

The solution is indeed to add the vcs scheme:

pip install git+https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit

This can be closed.

[techtonik]

But Git is somehow able to pull from this URL, so pip should be able to pull from this too.

[defance]

Yes. That's why you specify vcs scheme to perform pull. If you say git+ then pip will use git to pull.

[techtonik]

@defance, you misunderstood. The Git somehow communicates with web server to receive info that the https:// URL also contains a Git repository, which it then clones, so pip can do this too.

[xavfernandez]

git starts by sending a GET on /info/refs?service=git-upload-pack with User-Agent: git/1.9.1.
bzr, hg and svn each certainly do something different.

pip could certainly first try to get a valid package file and if it can not determine the archive format, tries each bzr+https, git+https, hg+https and svn+https.

Or the user could directly provide the needed information...

[techtonik]

pip could certainly first try to get a valid package file and if it can not determine the archive format, tries each bzr+https, git+https, hg+https and svn+https.

Yes, this is what I expect it to do. Maybe lightweight probes are better than a full fledged try/fail cycle?

[dstufft]

Closing this as the issue seems to be trying to install an HTML page instead of a git repository.

[pwaller]

@dstufft, even if the use case is bad, the error message is still not informative and confusing for anyone unfortunate enough to hit this accidentally. Is there any way that could be improved, perhaps by detecting that the content type is wrong, or something like this?

[dstufft]

@pwaller it has an error message now:

$ pip install https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
Collecting https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
  Downloading https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit
     - 92kB 3.6MB/s
  Cannot unpack file /private/var/folders/14/9jkprxq17f30vp_2wbfw79780000gn/T/pip-QcRZcu-unpack/legit (downloaded from /private/var/folders/14/9jkprxq17f30vp_2wbfw79780000gn/T/pip-PJXNfN-build, content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8); cannot detect archive format
Cannot determine archive format of /private/var/folders/14/9jkprxq17f30vp_2wbfw79780000gn/T/pip-PJXNfN-build