So I was really eager to try generating a django model diagram with django-extensions by doing the following:
manage.py graph_models -a -g -o my_project_visualized.png
Then I realized I need pygraphviz to make it work. I’m running Windows 7 64bit, so I installed Activestate and Graphviz as suggested by the documentation as a requirement. Graphviz 2.28 was installed quite successfully and then Activestate was installed with some tweaks msiexec /package activestate_install.exe /qr because it always stuck at “finish checking disk spaces required”.
Later, it turns out activestate wasn’t really helping in installing pygraphviz. So after a lot of trial and errors, I managed to install pygraphviz by following this guide http://blog.ropardo.ro/2011/11/28/installing-pygraphviz-on-windows/. Just as I tried to run the graph_models command again, python once again tells me that pygraphviz module is not installed… so I pip freeze to see if it’s really not installed. Now comes the good part, pip freeze returns a traceback of ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application. But that only happens in virtualenvs, when get out of virturalenvs and pip freeze, it works as expected.
By googling around, I realized I might have installed some 64bit version package while having 32bit python 2.7.3 on my machine, and that’s indeed what I did. Just that I don’t remember which ones I installed were 64bit. It’s late at night, and I’m tired and frustrated, so I started uninstalling things that I thought might be causing the problem. I uninstalled mingw32 and Activestate, and the next thing I know, I can’t even get into python from command line. pip is not recognized either; every python package is not recognized. Checking back at the Python27 directory, half of the folders are gone in C:\Python27\Lib. There used to be a lot of files and folders which it’s impossible for me to recall what they are, and now there’s only 4 directories:
bsddb, importlib, site-packages, and test
and the site-packages folder is a lot “cleaner”, too! I’m sure there used to be a lot of package files and scripts (some .pth files and .py files). Now there’s only two files easy-install.pth and PIL.pth and some folders for some packages I installed. However, the most critical issue is I can’t even use python in cmd now.
I thought maybe uninstalling activestate messed up some of the environmental variables I set, then I went into the system settings and added in things like C:\Python27\Scripts;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages to PATH. I went back into cmd, and typed “python” and “pip”, the response I get for python is The system cannot find the path specified., and for pip it’s still 'pip' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
This is kind of the only time that I regret for not setting up a system restore point..
Could anyone please tell me what’s going on here, what am I doing wrong, and how am I supposed to get everything working again? Thanks a lot!
Boy, you indeed messed up your installation. “ActiveState” is a python distribution for Windows, so you installed a new python distribution over your old one. When you uninstalled, it obligingly removed your python installation, including the default library.
You’ll have to reinstall your Python installation, I’m afraid. Start from scratch or backup.
You have my sympathies, if that’s any consolation.