Question

I’m trying to run a python script using python 2.6.4. The hosting company has 2.4 installed so I compiled my own 2.6.4 on a similar server and then moved the files over into ~/opt/python. that part seems to be working fine.

anyhow, when I run the script below, I am getting ImportError: No module named _sqlite3 and I’m not sure what to do to fix this.

Most online threads mention that sqlite / sqlite3 is included in python 2.6 – so I’m not sure why this isn’t working.

-jailshell-3.2$ ./pyDropboxValues.py 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./pyDropboxValues.py", line 21, in 
    import sqlite3
  File "/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/__init__.py", line 24, in 
    from dbapi2 import *
  File "/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dbapi2.py", line 27, in 
    from _sqlite3 import *
ImportError: No module named _sqlite3

I think I have everything set up right as far as the directory structure.

-jailshell-3.2$ find `pwd` -type d

/home/myAccount/opt
/home/myAccount/opt/bin
/home/myAccount/opt/include
/home/myAccount/opt/include/python2.6
/home/myAccount/opt/lib
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/distutils
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/distutils/command
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/distutils/tests
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/compiler
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/test
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/test/decimaltestdata
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/config
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/json
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/json/tests
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/email
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/email/test
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/email/test/data
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/email/mime
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib2to3
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib2to3/pgen2
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib2to3/fixes
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib2to3/tests
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/xml
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/xml/parsers
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/xml/sax
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/xml/etree
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/xml/dom
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/site-packages
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/logging
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/test
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/encodings
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/wsgiref
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/multiprocessing
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/multiprocessing/dummy
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/curses
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/bsddb
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/bsddb/test
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/idlelib
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/idlelib/Icons
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/tmp
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib-old
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/lib-tk
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/hotshot
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/plat-linux2
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/ctypes
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/ctypes/test
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/ctypes/macholib
/home/myAccount/opt/share
/home/myAccount/opt/share/man
/home/myAccount/opt/share/man/man1

And finally the contents of the sqlite3 directory:

-jailshell-3.2$ find `pwd`

/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/__init__.pyo
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dump.pyc
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/__init__.pyc
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dbapi2.pyo
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dbapi2.pyc
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dbapi2.py
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dump.pyo
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/__init__.py
/home/myAccount/opt/lib/python2.6/sqlite3/dump.py

I feel like I need to add something into the sqlite3 directory – maybe sqlite3.so? But I don’t know where to get that.

What am I doing wrong here? Please remember that I’m using a shared host so that means installing / compiling on another server and then copying the files over. Thanks! 🙂

Update
Just wanted to confirm that the answer from @samplebias did work out very well. I needed to have the dev package installed on the machine I was compiling from to get it to add in sqlite3.so and related files. Also found the link in the answer very helpful. Thanks @samplebias !

Answer 1

Python’s build system uses a setup.py file to compile all of the native extensions, including sqlite3. It searches common operating system paths for the sqlite3 include and library dirs. If the sqlite3 development package is not installed Python will skip compiling the _sqlite3.so extension, but the pure Python portion of the sqlite3 package will still be installed.

You would need to have the operating system’s sqlite3 development package installed when you compile Python and at runtime: sqlite3-devel on Centos, both libsqlite3-0 and libsqlite3-dev on Ubuntu.

Here’s an example of the _sqlite3.so extension linkage on my Ubuntu system:

% ldd /usr/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload/_sqlite3.so | grep sqlite3
    libsqlite3.so.0 => /usr/lib/libsqlite3.so.0 (0x00007f29ef3be000)
% dpkg -S /usr/lib/libsqlite3.so.0
    libsqlite3-0: /usr/lib/libsqlite3.so.0