How to solve Ansible venv runtime exception in specific versions?

Question

I want to set up a venv with the following packages as these are specified in a project I'm working on:

ionoscloud==6.1.4
pytest==6.2.5
pytest-cov==3.0.0
ansible==5.0.1
PyYAML==6.0
kubernetes==24.2.0
pyOpenSSL==22.0.0
requests==2.28.1
urllib3==1.26.1
netaddr==0.8.0

I use the following steps:

$ mkdir venv
$ cd venv
$ python -m venv .
$ cp /path/to/requirements.txt .
$ source bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

After that, I enter ansible --version (or anything) and get the following output:

ERROR! Unexpected Exception, this is probably a bug: '_AnsiblePathHookFinder' object has no attribute 'find_spec'
the full traceback was:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/arbeit/code/virtual-environments/venv/bin/ansible", line 97, in <module>
    mycli = getattr(__import__("ansible.cli.%s" % sub, fromlist=[myclass]), myclass)
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/home/arbeit/code/virtual-environments/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/ansible/cli/__init__.py", line 21, in <module>
    from ansible.inventory.manager import InventoryManager
  File "/home/arbeit/code/virtual-environments/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/ansible/inventory/manager.py", line 39, in <module>
    from ansible.utils.helpers import deduplicate_list
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1360, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1322, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1262, in _find_spec
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 1528, in find_spec
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 1502, in _get_spec
AttributeError: '_AnsiblePathHookFinder' object has no attribute 'find_spec'

• My python --version returns Python 3.12.4 which I installed via my distro (pacman/Arch)
• The same requirements used to work before, so I assume this is related to my distro updating to the latest python version
• In a new venv where I just pip install ansible, I can run Ansible just fine
• I installed Python 3.7 as well and set up an venv with that, to no success. Ansible probably calls /usr/bin/python and I'm not sure how to make it use 3.7

I'd be happy for hints what could be wrong here.

Answer 1

It seems like python 3.12 is incompatible with Ansible 5.0.1. Compatibility matrix

The solution was to install python 3.10 as well and set up the environment with python 3.10:

python3.10 -m venv debug310
cd debug310
pip install ansible==5.0.1
ansible --version