pip install Error: setup script specifies an absolute path

This is caused by an absolute path specified in a SOURCES.txt file within the project's egg-info, if include_package_data=True is present in setup.py. In this case, 'django_inplaceedit.egg-info/SOURCES.txt' contains the string /tmp/pip-rl1_7G-build/AUTHORS.rst, an invalid absolute path. Under some circumstances either pip and/or setuptools may put in the full path of a file from a source tree into it. I have not been able to effectively reproduce this yet, but I suspect the include_package_data flag in setup.py aggravates this issue. To fix, simply just nuke that SOURCES.txt file in the egg-info directory and rerun setup.py install again from the source directory.

I was facing the same error and fixed it by commenting out

include_package_data=True

in setup.py module