Httpie: Brew installed version doesn't work with plugins

@rshurts you're right. Plugin installation for Homebrew-based installs doesn't work out of the box.

There are advantages to keeping Homebrew as the recommended method, though. It makes updates easy and the main package can depend on Python 3 (improved SSL support, etc.).

The ideal world solution would be to have all plugins available as Homebrew packages (brew install httpie-oauth) . But that would mean extra work for maintainers so not all plugins would end up in Homebrew.

Using pip to install plugins looks like the easier way to go. To make it work with Hombrew, it would mean instructing pip to use (currently) /usr/local/Cellar/httpie/0.9.8_2/libexec/lib/python3.6/site-packages as the installation directory.

But plugins installed there won't survive HTTPie upgrades.

Perhaps it would be possible to tweak the Homebrew formula to makeallow HTTPie load installed plugins from, for example, the Homebrew Python 3 site-packages (not sure if it's permanent). Or from another location.

…or some sort of custom plugin installer.

In the meantime, maybe a note in the documentation around plugins saying "brew doesn't work with plugins and to pip install httpie for plugin functionality" would save some headaches.

There is also a problem with the read rights when user has no admin rights:

$ http --help
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/http", line 6, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 3123, in <module>
    @_call_aside
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 3107, in _call_aside
    f(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 3136, in _initialize_master_working_set
    working_set = WorkingSet._build_master()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 569, in _build_master
    ws = cls()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 562, in __init__
    self.add_entry(entry)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 618, in add_entry
    for dist in find_distributions(entry, True):
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1965, in find_on_path
    for dist in factory(fullpath):
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2035, in distributions_from_metadata
    root, entry, metadata, precedence=DEVELOP_DIST,
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2492, in from_location
    py_version=py_version, platform=platform, **kw
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2867, in _reload_version
    md_version = _version_from_file(self._get_metadata(self.PKG_INFO))
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2456, in _version_from_file
    line = next(iter(version_lines), '')
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2646, in _get_metadata
    for line in self.get_metadata_lines(name):
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1411, in get_metadata_lines
    return yield_lines(self.get_metadata(name))
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1407, in get_metadata
    value = self._get(self._fn(self.egg_info, name))
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1519, in _get
    with open(path, 'rb') as stream:
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/idna-2.7-py3.7.egg-info/PKG-INFO'

I was able to fix it with

chmod +r /usr/local/Cellar/httpie/1.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/idna-2.7-py3.7.egg-info/PKG-INFO

but switched to pip3 install httpie because of it made it easier to install plugins.

Since I upgraded to 10.14 Mojave I'm having the permissions error mentioned by @aheissenberger above. I have the same setup where I install homebrew using a local admin account but do normal operation in a standard account. I'm not a Python person and don't understand this discussion of plugins. I do not recall trying to add anything httpie beyond whatever comes as part of the homebrew formula. pip3 list only shows 3 items which presumably were part of the initial Python bundle.

Is this fundamentally a Python3 problem (at least, Python as installed via homebrew)? Should I be reporting it to the maintainers?

For what it's worth and perhaps other users googling for an answer, installing a plugin worked fine for me like this:

pip3 install -t /usr/local/Cellar/httpie/2.0.0/libexec/lib/python3.8/site-packages httpie-jwt-auth

Thanks https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/issues/566#issuecomment-285210693