Installing spotify’s annoy on a Windows machine
Spotify has shared the annoy library for nearest-neighbor calculations. However, trying to install it on Windows can give cryptic errors if python does not have access to the latest C compiler. In this post, I tell you how to fix this issue.
1 Installation errors for annoy
When trying to install the annoy python library, you might encounter a cryptic error like: error: command 'gcc'. failed with exit status 1 This error is due to python not having access to the latest C compiler.
When searching for a solution to this problem, I found many poor solutions which instead advised to use pre-compiled versions. Please, please, please never use random compiled code from unvetted third parties: that’s a major security risk! Instead, this error is very easy to fix: we just have to install the latest version of the C compiler.
2 Installing the C compiler on Windows
Microsoft provides a download link for the C++ build tools. This actually downloads an installer util which will itself install the build tools:
Download the file from the Microsoft website.
Run it.
Among the many installation options, select the latest version Visual Studio Build Tools (at the time of this writing, 2022).
And done! You should now be able to install annoy:
pip install annoyWhen installing python packages, please keep in mind the good practice of creating a separate environment for each project. I recommend using the built-in venv util for this, and accessing it via the VSCode command line.