ImportError: cannot import name _thread

[hakanson]

I just installed aws-shell on Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.5) and got the following error on first execution:

$ aws-shell
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/aws-shell", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('aws-shell==0.1.1', 'console_scripts', 'aws-shell')()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 357, in load_entry_point
    return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 2394, in load_entry_point
    return ep.load()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 2108, in load
    entry = __import__(self.module_name, globals(),globals(), ['__name__'])
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/awsshell/__init__.py", line 7, in <module>
    from awsshell import shellcomplete
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/awsshell/shellcomplete.py", line 15, in <module>
    import botocore.session
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/botocore/session.py", line 26, in <module>
    import botocore.credentials
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/botocore/credentials.py", line 22, in <module>
    from dateutil.parser import parse
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 43, in <module>
    from . import tz
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/dateutil/tz/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .tz import *
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/dateutil/tz/tz.py", line 23, in <module>
    from ._common import tzname_in_python2, _tzinfo, _total_seconds
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/dateutil/tz/_common.py", line 2, in <module>
    from six.moves import _thread
ImportError: cannot import name _thread

I solved by following the advice of Matplotlib issue on OS X (“ImportError: cannot import name _thread”) and changing the versions of python-dateutil.

sudo pip uninstall python-dateutil
sudo pip install python-dateutil==2.2

I'm not well versed in Python, but this looks related to the version of six and I wanted to post this issue to see if that was the right fix and it should be added to the README, or if it is something that should be fixed.

[donnemartin]

Hi @hakanson, thanks for the detailed report.

I think your fix is correct. We have a similar fix for El-Capitan users discussed in the README, perhaps that section could be expanded.

[mintisan]

Thanks for your sharing. It works for me On macOS EI Caption Version 10.11.6

[dblock]

This worked for me. But seriously ...