Where does pip look for wheel files?

Question

I want to install TensorFlow with pip:pip install tensorflow as shown on the original site but i got error:

Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensorflow (from versions: ) No matching distribution found for tensorflow

So I tried to download wheel file from PyPI and tried pip install tensorflow.whl and got error:

Requirement 'tensorflow.whl' looks like a filename, but the file does not exist tensorflow.whl is not a valid wheel filename.

How I see it, it means that file isn't in directory pip searches in. Can somebody tell me what did I do wrong or where to move file so it works.

Answer 1

Why pip install tensorflow failed, I cannot tell. Maybe you are behind a firewall? Or there could be environment variables named PIP_* that affect its behavior.

The wheels for tensorflow from PyPI have names such as tensorflow-1.14.0-cp35-cp35m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl. If you download and install one, then keep the filename, and tell pip exactly where the file is located. For example

pip install ./downloads/tensorflow-1.14.0-cp35-cp35m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl

As the second part of the error message indicates, tensorflow.whl is not a valid filename for a wheel package. It's missing all the extra information from the original filename. I guess you chose a simple filename when downloading, but that doesn't work with wheels.