grpc python installed with virtualenv, code complains no google.protobuf found on Mac OS X

[awakenrz]

hmm. I installed my grpc with
$ brew tap grpc
$ brew install grpc/grpc

Then I tried to install grpc python with
$ sudo pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ curl -fsSL https://goo.gl/getgrpc | bash -s python

No error happened, but when I try to import google.protobuf in my python code, it complains google.protobuf cannot be found.

I'm able to
from grpc.beta import implementations
But the following line gives an error:
from google.protobuf import descriptor as _descriptor
ImportError: No module named google.protobuf

[soltanmm]

@tbetbetbe Is brew-install supposed to check for and pull in dependencies? If so, should proto3 have a brew-thing?

[eonezhang]

I've also encountered this issue.

brew install grpc/grpc/google-protobuf
==> Installing google-protobuf from grpc/grpc
==> Downloading https://github.com/google/protobuf/archive/v3.0.0.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Users/ezhang6/Library/Caches/Homebrew/google-protobuf-3.0.0.tar.gz
==> ./autogen.sh
Last 15 lines from /Users/ezhang6/Library/Logs/Homebrew/google-protobuf/01.autogen.sh:
2016-08-29 18:37:10 +0800

./autogen.sh

Google Mock not present. Fetching gmock-1.7.0 from the web...
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 1582 100 1582 0 0 686 0 0:00:02 0:00:02 --:--:-- 687
[gmock-1.7.0.zip]
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of gmock-1.7.0.zip or
gmock-1.7.0.zip.zip, and cannot find gmock-1.7.0.zip.ZIP, period.

READ THIS: https://git.io/brew-troubleshooting
If reporting this issue please do so at (not Homebrew/brew):
https://github.com/grpc/homebrew-grpc/issues

These open issues may also help:
grpc python installed with virtualenv, code complains no google.protobuf found on Mac OS X #71

[hasIan]

I just encountered the same problem you described, @eonezhang. The problem with the autogen.sh is that the curl invocation that is attempting to pull gmock is getting a 404. Gmock is available on Github, though, so I tried changing autogen.sh like so:

-- autogen.sh   2016-07-27 14:40:30.000000000 -0700
+++ autogen.fixed.sh    2016-08-31 01:21:44.000000000 -0700
@@ -31,10 +31,10 @@
 # directory is set up as an SVN external.
 if test ! -e gmock; then
   echo "Google Mock not present.  Fetching gmock-1.7.0 from the web..."
-  curl $curlopts -O https://googlemock.googlecode.com/files/gmock-1.7.0.zip
+  curl $curlopts -L -o gmock-1.7.0.zip https://github.com/google/googlemock/archive/release-1.7.0.zip
   unzip -q gmock-1.7.0.zip
   rm gmock-1.7.0.zip
-  mv gmock-1.7.0 gmock
+  mv googlemock-release-1.7.0 gmock
 fi

This got me past the error above. However, since I'm messing with the contents of the protobuf tarball directly, this is a protobuf issue, not a Homebrew issue. Protobuf itself has been fixed, but this change is not contained in a released version yet.

If you are willing to brew install google-protobuf --HEAD, though, it will install successfully. Alternatively, you can temporarily avoid using Homebrew for protobuf and download the binary installation from Github and just install this into your /usr/local hierarchy until a new version is released with the fix and it gets picked up by Homebrew.