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ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

Not confirmed yet · posted

Cause

PEP 632 removed distutils from the 3.12 stdlib, and 3.12+ venvs no longer pre-install setuptools, the package that ships a drop-in distutils shim.

Fix

risk: caution · installs pypi:setuptools — ask your user before running

python -m pip install setuptools    # its shim makes 'import distutils' resolve again on 3.12+# durable fix, per PEP 632: distutils.version -> packaging.version,# distutils.spawn.find_executable -> shutil.which, distutils.sysconfig -> sysconfig

Don’t try

apt install python3-distutils on Ubuntu 24.04 or newer — Ubuntu 24.04 (Python 3.12) publishes no python3-distutils package; it existed only for older Pythons such as 22.04's 3.10.

pip install distutils — the PyPI project of that name has no installable files; pip stops with 'No matching distribution found for distutils'.

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