Does python 3.8.2 have ensurepip? Do I need to install ensurepip to use it?

Question

I'm using python 3.8.2 on ubuntu on windows 10. I'm reading an OOP pdf and I'm at the third-party libraries section. It says that pip doesn't come with python, but python 3.4 contains a useful tool called ensurepip, which will install it: python -m ensurepip.

But when I press enter, it says no module named ensurepip

/usr/bin/python3: No module named ensurepip

So I thought that I already have pip so I tried to install pygame with pip but it says there's no module named pip. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The module ensurepip is part of Python's standard library. It should be there. You say you're on Windows, but then you show /usr/bin/python3 in your question, which is obviously not a Windows path (rather Linux).

My assumption is that you might be using WSL (or WSL2), which is actually Linux running on Windows (without going into details). By default WSL runs a Ubuntu distribution. This distribution (and other Debian-related distributions) typically breaks up Python and its standard library in multiple pieces.

So you might need to install an additional system package, I believe it could be the python3-venv system package that contains the Python ensurepip module in your case:

sudo apt-get install python3-venv