CONTINUAL INTEGRATION

Problem scenario
Your apt or yum repositories do not have the newest version of python-setuptools (aka easy_install) available.  You need to install a recent version.  What should you do?

Solution
Prerequisites
a.  You need to have unzip installed.  Debian/Ubuntu servers usually have this by default, but if you still need assistance, see the Debian/Ubuntu link below.  Click on your distribution of Linux for assistance with installing unzip:
CentOS/RHEL/Fedora
Debian/Ubuntu
SUSE
b.  If the server is completely new, we recommend uninstalling python-setuptools.  If you have installed Docker or other tools that rely on python-setuptools, we do not recommend uninstalling python-setuptools as it is a dependency to other packages.  If you do remove python-setuptools, the first command in step #3 below will return an error.

Procedures
1.  If you need to upgrade python-setuptools on a Linux server you can download the zip file from here.  If you have access to the internet, run this command (but substitute the URL with the desired .zip file on the page that is hyperlinked earlier and replace "file.zip" with the name of the file that you are downloading): curl -Lk http://pypi.org/path/to/file.zip > /tmp/file.zip
2.  Copy the .zip file to the /bin/ directory: sudo mv /tmp/file.zip /bin
3.  Run these commands:
sudo mv /bin/easy_install ~
cd /bin
sudo unzip nameOfFileabove.zip
cd setuptools   #then press tab to autocomplete
sudo python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

4.  You should be done.  To test your version of easy_install (which is the same as python-setuptools), run this command:
easy_install --version
For the sake of a proof-of-concept, provided you are not in a sensitive environment, you can ignore a message "ImportError: No module named py31compat".  Otherwise you may want to address this message.

Problem scenario
You are trying to install python-snappy on Ubuntu (or a Debian distribution of) Linux.  You go here and find no obvious dependencies or prerequisites:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-snappy

But when you try to install it, you run "python setup.py build" and get an error like this:

"/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py:267: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'install_requires'
  warnings.warn(msg)
running build
running build_py
package init file '__init__.py' not found (or not a regular file)
package init file '__init__.py' not found (or not a regular file)
running build_ext
building '_snappy' extension
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time - D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c  snappymodule.cc -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/snappymodule.o
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus': execvp: No such file or directory
error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1"

or an error like this:

"x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time - D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c  snappymodule.cc -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/snappymodule.o
cc1plus: warning: command line option ‘-Wstrict-prototypes’ is valid for C/ObjC but not for C++
snappymodule.cc:28:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated."

What should you do to install snappy for Python?

Solution
Run these four commands:

sudo apt-get -y install python-pip

sudo su -

pip install snappy

exit

#If you are not allowed to leave pip installed, run this command: "sudo apt-get -y remove python-pip" with no quotes

Problem scenario
You are not sure if snappy (the Python development tool) is installed.  You try these two commands:

python
>>> import snappy

You see this:

"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "snappy.py", line 50, in <module>
    from snappy_cffi import UncompressError, compress, decompress, \
  File "snappy_cffi.py", line 3, in <module>
    from cffi import FFI
ImportError: No module named cffi
"

The above means snappy is not installed or if you recently installed it, the environment variables are not updated.  

Potential root cause
You installed it but the environment variables have not been updated and refreshed. 

Solution
Log off as the current user and log back in.

Then use option 1 if you have pip installed:

pip list | grep -i snappy

Then use option 2 if you do not have pip installed:

Run these two commands:

python
>>> import snappy #where ">>>" is not something that you type in

# If you see no errors in the above, then snappy has been installed