The error: Fatal error in launcher: “Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory” is a common error that can show up in many ways. In this blog, we will go through some of the ways you can fix this issue. Read on.

How To Solve The Error: “Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory”?

When attempting to install the Python package, you may experience the following issue.

Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘c:\\users\\ssc\\appdata\\roaming\\python\\python37\\site-packages\\pip-19.0.1.dist-info\\METADATA’

To resolve this issue, this limitation can be increased to nearly 32,000 characters in the most recent versions of Windows. The “Enable Win32 long paths” group policy must be enabled, or the registry value must be changed to 1: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem@LongPathsEnabled.

Option 1: Delete the MAX_PATH Limitation

Path lengths in Windows have been limited to 260 characters for a long time. This implied that longer paths longer would fail to resolve, resulting in errors.

This limitation can be increased to nearly 32,000 characters in the most recent versions of Windows. The “Enable Win32 long paths” group policy must be enabled, or the registry value must be changed to 1: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem@LongPathsEnabled.

This enables the open() function, the os module, and many other path-related functions to admit and return paths that are longer than 260 characters.

No additional configuration is necessary after modifying the above option.

Option 2: Delete the folder and retry

In some cases, you might face error in this path. c:\\users\\ssc\\anaconda3\\envs\\env-gpu\\lib\\site-packages\\requests-2.24.0.dist-info\\METADATA

So, simply remove ‘c:\\users\\ssc\\anaconda3\\envs\\env-gpu\\lib\\site-packages\\requests-2.24.0.dist-info’ path and retry pip install my-package command. And your package will be successfully installed.

Option 3: Set the registry

This is similar to the first solution. Simply click Start, then Run. Paste %systemroot%\syswow64\regedit into the Open box, then click OK. Simply set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem@LongPathsEnabled to 1.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed our article about the error. With this knowledge, we know that you can fix your error: “Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory” quickly by following these steps! If you still have any other questions about fixing this syntax error, please leave a comment below. Thank you for reading!