Post: When you encounter the error ‘error: invalid command ‘bdist_wheel’ after creating a venv’ in Python

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Often, after creating and activating a venv, one might encounter the following error. error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

tl;dr

pip install wheel After doing so, python setup.py bdist_wheel It is said that it will work.

For me, just running pip install wheel works fine.

Why?

Even if you install wheel in the global Python, when creating a venv without giving options, only a minimum number of packages are installed.

Right after creating the venv, if you run pip list, it shows like below…

Package       Version
------------- -------
pip           20.0.2 
pkg-resources 0.0.0  
setuptools    44.0.0

As you can see, it is evident that wheel is not included.

If you want to inherit global packages and create a venv, you can initialize it with the --system-site-packages option like below. python -m venv {env_dir} --system-site-packages