python 3.x - virtualenv: cannot import name 'main'

Question

I'm having a little trouble with virtualenv on Mac OS X Yosemite. After I couldn't run virtualenv at all first, I installed Python 3 via brew (previously I installed it via the package on python.org). I linked this installation of python3, updated pip and ran pip3 install virtualenv. When I try to run virtualenv (e.g. $ virtualenv --python=python3 ../virtualenv), I get the following error message.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/virtualenv", line 7, in <module>
    from virtualenv import main
  File "/usr/local/bin/virtualenv.py", line 7, in <module>
    from virtualenv import main
ImportError: cannot import name 'main'

Can anybody help me with this?

Answer 1

After my upgrade to Fedora 32 I had the same issue which lead me to this question:

ImportError: cannot import name 'main' from 'virtualenv'

In my case I actually seemed to have both /usr/local/bin/virtualenv as well as $HOME/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/virtualenv/__init__.py.

Removing the user virtualenv version and reinstalling it into the system with root fixed the issue:

pip uninstall virtualenv

sudo pip install virtualenv