[Fixed] ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘zmq’

Quick Fix: Python raises the ImportError: No module named 'zmq' when it cannot find the library zmq . The most frequent source of this error is that you haven’t installed zmq explicitly with pip install zmq . Alternatively, you may have different Python versions on your computer, and zmq is not installed for the particular version you’re using.

In particular, you can try any of the following commands, depending on your concrete environment and installation needs:

💡 If you have only one version of Python installed:
pip install zmq
💡 If you have Python 3 (and, possibly, other versions) installed:
pip3 install zmq
💡 If you don't have PIP or it doesn't work
python -m pip install zmq
python3 -m pip install zmq
💡 If you have Linux and you need to fix permissions (any one):
sudo pip3 install zmq
pip3 install zmq --user
💡 If you have Linux with apt
sudo apt install zmq
💡 If you have Windows and you have set up the py alias
py -m pip install zmq
💡 If you have Anaconda
conda install -c anaconda zmq
💡 If you have Jupyter Notebook
!pip install zmq
!pip3 install zmq

Problem Formulation

You’ve just learned about the awesome capabilities of the zmq library and you want to try it out, so you start your code with the following statement:

import zmq

This is supposed to import the zmq library into your (virtual) environment . However, it only throws the following ImportError: No module named zmq :

>>> import zmq
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    import zmq
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'zmq'

Solution Idea 1: Install Library zmq

The most likely reason is that Python doesn’t provide zmq in its standard library. You need to install it first!

Before being able to import the zmq module, you need to install it using Python’s package manager pip . Make sure pip is installed on your machine.

To fix this error, you can run the following command in your Windows shell:

$ pip install zmq

This simple command installs zmq in your virtual environment on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It assumes that your pip version is updated. If it isn’t, use the following two commands in your terminal, command line, or shell (there’s no harm in doing it anyways):

$ python -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ pip install zmq

💡 Note : Don’t copy and paste the $ symbol. This is just to illustrate that you run it in your shell/terminal/command line.

Solution Idea 2: Fix the Path

The error might persist even after you have installed the zmq library. This likely happens because pip is installed but doesn’t reside in the path you can use. Although pip may be installed on your system the script is unable to locate it. Therefore, it is unable to install the library using pip in the correct path.

To fix the problem with the path in Windows follow the steps given next.

Step 1 : Open the folder where you installed Python by opening the command prompt and typing where python

Step 2 : Once you have opened the Python folder, browse and open the Scripts folder and copy its location. Also verify that the folder contains the pip file.

Step 3 : Now open the Scripts directory in the command prompt using the cd command and the location that you copied previously.

Step 4 : Now install the library using pip install zmq command. Here’s an analogous example:

After having followed the above steps, execute our script once again. And you should get the desired output.

Other Solution Ideas

• The ModuleNotFoundError may appear due to relative imports . You can learn everything about relative imports and how to create your own module in this article .
• You may have mixed up Python and pip versions on your machine. In this case, to install zmq for Python 3, you may want to try python3 -m pip install zmq or even pip3 install zmq instead of pip install zmq
• If you face this issue server-side, you may want to try the command pip install --user zmq
• If you’re using Ubuntu, you may want to try this command: sudo apt install zmq
• You can also check out this article to learn more about possible problems that may lead to an error when importing a library.

Understanding the “import” Statement

import zmq

In Python, the import statement serves two main purposes:

• Search the module by its name, load it, and initialize it.
• Define a name in the local namespace within the scope of the import statement. This local name is then used to reference the accessed module throughout the code.

What’s the Difference Between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

What’s the difference between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError ?

Python defines an error hierarchy , so some error classes inherit from other error classes. In our case, the ModuleNotFoundError is a subclass of the ImportError class.

You can see this in this screenshot from the docs :

You can also check this relationship using the issubclass() built-in function:

>>> issubclass(ModuleNotFoundError, ImportError)