Zlib error

[shelbyKiraM]

On Mac OS 10.11 El Capitan, on run, I get a zlib error. It's both in the OS and installed by Homebrew, not sure why I'm getting this.

$ youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhA9gx2n6E"
/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python2.7: can't decompress data; zlib not available

[jaimeMF]

Maybe the python is misconfigured, but I don't know why it is trying to use zlib because the youtube-dl file is a zip file. What happens if you run the following statements in python?:

$ python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jul  3 2015, 01:26:20)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import zipfile
>>> import zipimport
>>> import zlib

Also is that the only message you get? What happens if you use the -v option?

[shelbyKiraM]

$ youtube-dl --verbose "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhA9gx2n6E"
/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python2.7: can't decompress data; zlib not available

---

$ python2
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jul  4 2015, 11:02:28)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.0.0 (clang-700.0.53)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import zipfile
>>> import zipimport
>>> import zlib
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named zlib
>>> 

Additionally, when I try to run python it says: zsh: command not found: python3 but when I try to run brew install python3 it dies on zlib.

I'm trying brew install python3 --universal now.

[jaimeMF]

Note that unless you have a python in your PATH symlinked to a python3 executable, youtube-dl will use python 2.x (2.7 in your case) so installing python3 wouldn't solve anything. But you can try running python3 $(which youtube-dl) and see if it also fails.

[shelbyKiraM]

Turns out I had alias python='python3' In my .zshrc

[shelbyKiraM]

And I can't get python3 because of a zlib error.

[jaimeMF]

I guess that /usr/local/opt/python/bin/python2.7 is provided by Homebrew, you could try with the python provided by OS X: run /usr/bin/python $(which youtube-dl) and execute the commands I gave in /usr/bin/python.

[shelbyKiraM]

Works fine, using system python. >.<

[jaimeMF]

I'm going to close the issue then, it's either a problem in the build from Homebrew or a bug in python (the version from OSX is probably a bit older).

[snshn]

This worked for me: Homebrew/homebrew-core#29176 (comment)