TKinter in a Virtualenv

I am using python2.7 with a virtualenv on a machine running linux mint. I received the exact same error as mentioned by the OP when running an application that required matplotlib in my virtualenv. "ImportError: No module named _tkinter, please install the python-tk package"

I ended up deleting and recreating my virtual environment using the suggestions in the above posts. Here are my steps:

  1. if your virtual environment is activated, then run this command to freeze the requirements to a file that you can access later: pip freeze > requirements.txt
  2. if your virtual environment is activated, then deactivate it using: deactivate
  3. delete your virtualenv folder.
  4. install python-tk using: sudo apt-get install python-tk
  5. recreate your virtualenv using: virtualenv <nameofyourenv> --system-site-packages
  6. next, activate your virtualenv: source <virtual environment folder>/bin/activate
  7. restore all your packages that you froze earlier from the requirements.txt file: pip install -r <path to requirements.txt file>

now, when I run the same code as before, it has no problem importing _tkinter. Hope this helps! Thanks to the everyone's suggestions above. It really helped me a lot.


Set the environment variable TCL_LIBRARY in your activate script. On Windows (Python 2.7 with Tcl 8.5), just add this line to Scripts\activate.bat:

set "TCL_LIBRARY=C:\Python27\tcl\tcl8.5"

@Jasper van den Bosch's edit: On Ubuntu, the modification to the script activate is the following:

TK_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk:/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL:/usr/lib
TKPATH=/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk:/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL:/usr/lib 
TCL_LIBRARY=/usr/lib 
export TCL_LIBRARY TK_LIBRARY TKPATH

The reference of this can be found on this question on askubuntu


I manage to integrate tkinter in python3 to virtualenv by symlink tkinter folder to virtualenv python3. I works for me. But I don't know if it's the right way.

  1. install tkinter
sudo apt-get install python3-tk
  1. go to your virtualenv's python lib folder 
cd ~/.virtualenvs/cv/lib/python3.4/
  1. link the tkinter
ln -s /usr/lib/python3.4/tkinter tkinter

Hope this helps.

In later versions of python, this may result in a 

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '_tkinter'

In this case, ensure to also symlink
/usr/lib/python3.x/lib-dynload/_tkinter.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
as path/to/virtualenv/lib/python3.x/lib-dynload/_tkinter.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so using

ln -s /usr/lib/python3.x/lib-dynload/_tkinter.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so _tkinter.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so

from within your virtualenv lib/python3.x/lib-dynload/ directory.

Tags:

Python

Tkinter

Virtualenv

Recent Posts