Today, I started following the Flask-Ask + Zappa guide. I’m using Ubuntu 18 on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to hopefully ease development.

I had an issue where I couldn’t install virtualenv with pip. This was fixed by passing the --user argument. With this fixed, I created my virtual environment to install my dependencies, but I ran into another error: I couldn’t install flask-ask. I received ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip.req'. Looking this up, I found this related issue: Flask-ask using Python 3.7 image. I realized that the guide is written for Python 2.7; I could run into more issues later if I continue to use Python 3.x. However, I really don’t want to use 2.7 because it’s not supported anymore.

I found the solution in this Stack Overflow question. Downgrading pip to 9.x with pip install --upgrade "pip<10" fixed my issue.