Frequently asked questions¶
cryptography failed to install!¶
If you are having issues installing cryptography the first troubleshooting
step is to upgrade pip and then try to install again. For most users this will
take the form of pip install -U pip, but on Windows you should do
python -m pip install -U pip. If you are still seeing errors after upgrading
and trying pip install cryptography again, please see the Installation
documentation.
How does cryptography compare to NaCl (Networking and Cryptography Library)?¶
While cryptography and NaCl both share the goal of making cryptography
easier, and safer, to use for developers, cryptography is designed to be a
general purpose library, interoperable with existing systems, while NaCl
features a collection of hand selected algorithms.
cryptography’s recipes layer has similar goals
to NaCl.
If you prefer NaCl’s design, we highly recommend PyNaCl, which is also maintained by the PyCA team.
Why use cryptography?¶
If you’ve done cryptographic work in Python before you have likely encountered
other libraries in Python such as M2Crypto, PyCrypto, or PyOpenSSL. In
building cryptography we wanted to address a few issues we observed in the
legacy libraries:
Compiling cryptography on macOS produces a fatal error: 'openssl/aes.h' file not found error¶
This happens because macOS 10.11 no longer includes a copy of OpenSSL.
cryptography now provides wheels which include a statically linked copy of
OpenSSL. You’re seeing this error because your copy of pip is too old to find
our wheel files. Upgrade your copy of pip with pip install -U pip and then
try install cryptography again.
If you are using PyPy, we do not currently ship cryptography wheels for
PyPy. You will need to install your own copy of OpenSSL – we recommend using
Homebrew.
cryptography raised an InternalError and I’m not sure what to do?¶
Frequently InternalError is raised when there are errors on the OpenSSL
error stack that were placed there by other libraries that are also using
OpenSSL. Try removing the other libraries and see if the problem persists.
If you have no other libraries using OpenSSL in your process, or they do not
appear to be at fault, it’s possible that this is a bug in cryptography.
Please file an issue with instructions on how to reproduce it.
error: -Werror=sign-conversion: No option -Wsign-conversion during installation¶
The compiler you are using is too old and not supported by cryptography.
Please upgrade to a more recent version. If you are running OpenBSD 6.1 or
earlier the default compiler is extremely old. Use pkg_add to install a
newer gcc and then install cryptography using
CC=/path/to/newer/gcc pip install cryptography.
Installing cryptography fails with Invalid environment marker: python_version < '3'¶
Your pip and/or setuptools are outdated. Please upgrade to the latest
versions with pip install -U pip setuptools (or on Windows
python -m pip install -U pip setuptools).
Installing cryptography with OpenSSL 0.9.8 or 1.0.0 fails¶
The OpenSSL project has dropped support for the 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 release series.
Since they are no longer receiving security patches from upstream,
cryptography is also dropping support for them. To fix this issue you
should upgrade to a newer version of OpenSSL (1.0.2 or later). This may require
you to upgrade to a newer operating system.
Why are there no wheels for Python 3.5+ on Linux or macOS?¶
Our Python3 wheels, for macOS and Linux, are abi3 wheels. This means they
support multiple versions of Python. The Python 3.4 abi3 wheel can be used
with any version of Python greater than or equal to 3.4. Recent versions of
pip will automatically install abi3 wheels.