Question

I’m running Python 2.6 on Unix and when I run the interactive prompt (SQLite is supposed to be preinstalled) I get:

[root@idev htdocs]# python Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Oct 23 2008, 16:25:34) [GCC 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)] on linux2 Type 'help', 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information. >>> import sqlite Traceback (most recent call last): File '<stdin>', line 1, in <module> ImportError: No module named sqlite >>> 

How do I resolve this?

Answer 1

The error:

ImportError: No module named _sqlite3 

means that SQLite 3 does not find the associated shared library. On Mac OS X it’s _sqlite3.so and it should be the same on other Unix systems.

To resolve the error you have to locate the _sqlite3.so library on your computer and then check your PYTHONPATH for this directory location.

To print the Python search path enter the following in the Python shell:

import sys print sys.path 

If the directory containing your library is missing you can try adding it interactively with

sys.path.append('/your/dir/here') 

and try

import sqlite3 

again. If this works you have to add this directory permanently to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

PS: If the library is missing you should (re-)install the module.