Python is one of the most popular programming languages around at the moment. Not only is it extremely easy to learn, even for absolute beginners, but it’s also quite powerful, often used in applications involving AI, ML and even computer vision.

It also comes with its own package manager called Pip which helps quickly find and install any libraries that you might need. Everything considered, it’s a great package, but there are still some bugs and glitches that you might experience from time to time.

In this article, we’re talking about the “error: command ‘/user/bin/clang’ failed with exit code 1” issue when installing packages with Pip on macOS. 

Also read: Fix: Python was not found; run without arguments to install 

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What causes this issue?

The error can be caused by a number of different problems including but not limited to the following.

• Outdated macOS version.
• Outdated Python/Pip version.
• Package availability on Pip.
• Issues with the target package itself.

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How to fix this?

Here are five fixes you can try out. 

Update your Mac

One of the first things you should do in such cases is to simply update your macOS installation to the latest available version. More often than not developers are aware of any such bugs and will release some sort of patch or update to address the issue.

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Update Pip

Outdated Pip installations can cause a lot of problems and aren’t recommended unless explicitly required for specific reasons. However, regardless of the installed version, one of the simplest solutions to this problem is to just update Pip manually using this command.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Or

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

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Update Pip dependencies

There’s also a chance that Pip’s dependencies may be causing problems. To make sure everything’s up to date, you can update setuptools and wheel using these commands once you’ve updated Pip.

pip install –upgrade wheel 
pip install –upgrade setuptools

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Install OpenSSL

Installing OpenSSL on macOS devices has also been known to resolve this error. To do so, simply run the command given below. 

brew install openssl re2
LDFLAGS="-L$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew --prefix openssl)/lib -L$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew --prefix re2)/lib" CPPFLAGS="-I$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew --prefix openssl)/include -I$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew --prefix re2)/include" GRPC_BUILD_WITH_BORING_SSL_ASM="" GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_RE2=true GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=true GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=true pip install grpcio

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Try a virtual environment

If you don’t want to mess up your existing Pip installation, you can also try and run the project inside a virtual environment using virtualenv to isolate your Python installation and running the code as well as installing the required libraries in an isolated environment. 

Also read: How to fix Javascript error: ipython is not defined?