One of my friends wanted to use SaltStack and https://github.com/napalm-automation/napalm-salt

But he had problems installing napalm-base package.

Note that the package is no longer maintained.

He tried with the last one, and with the previous one (0.25.0), but he always got the error: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘pip.req’

pip3 install napalm-base==0.25.0

Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting napalm-base==0.25.0
  Using cached napalm-base-0.25.0.tar.gz (35 kB)
  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
  
  × python setup.py egg_info did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [6 lines of output]
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<string>", line 2, in <module>
        File "<pip-setuptools-caller>", line 34, in <module>
        File "/tmp/pip-install-gzd07xzq/napalm-base_aace1b03ac0e4045bbc85e27c788ebc1/setup.py", line 5, in <module>
          from pip.req import parse_requirements
      ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip.req'
      [end of output]
  
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: metadata-generation-failed

× Encountered error while generating package metadata.
╰─> See above for output.

note: This is an issue with the package mentioned above, not pip.
hint: See above for details.

TL;TR: The problem is that pip version 10, changed the structure for req.

There are several solutions that can be done to make it work, but the easiest way is to downgrade pip, and install the package. After pip can be upgraded again.

python -m pip install pip==9.0.3
pip3 install napalm-base