Installing Matplotlib Inside A Virtualenv Using Pip On A Mac

The command suggested* to install matplotlib for python was: pip install -U git+git://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.git after choosing a virtualenv and then running that comman

Solution 1:

I had the same issue. The way it worked for me is the following:

sudo apt-get -y build-dep matplotlib  # then enter you root password
virtualenv -p python2.7 ~/venv
source ~/venv/bin/activate

The key being the first step where system wide matplotlib dependencies are installed. Source of this here.

Solution 2:

Maybe this is not what you want at all, but can you use conda to make your environment instead? E.g. conda create -n myenv anaconda? That would already have matplotlib in it. You can also customize exactly what goes in.