2 Nov 2023

Poetry: OSError: Precompiled binaries are not available for the current platform. Please reinstall from source

I’ve been playing around with the CTransformers library recently and getting it installed via Poetry was a bit fiddly. In this post, we’ll run through what I’ve ended up doing.

If we try to add the library in the usual way:

poetry add ctransformers

We’ll get the following error:

Output

OSError: Precompiled binaries are not available for the current platform. Please reinstall from source using:

  pip uninstall ctransformers --yes
  CT_METAL=1 pip install ctransformers --no-binary ctransformers

Instead, we need to call the following command to tell Poetry to install the library from source:

poetry config --local installer.no-binary ctransformers

We can then run the following command again:

poetry add ctransformers

And this time it will install from source. Unfortunately, I still haven’t worked out how to have Poetry pickup the CT_METAL environment variable, which means it doesn’t get installed with GPU support. To get GPU support I’m having to go around Poetry’s dependency management by running pip directly:

CT_METAL=1 poetry run pip install ctransformers

Which works, but isn’t ideal. If anybody knows how to have Poetry pick up the environment variable, please let me know in the comments.

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.