Need to downgrade/reinstall pip due to upgrade breaking all functionality

Question

On my Amazon EC2 instance, I upgraded pip on a whim, and now nearly every command I try to run with it returns an error like this:

pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'pip==9.0.1' distribution was not found and is required by the application

Now I can't really do anything to fix it from within pip. I tried running pip uninstall pip just to see if I would get lucky, and it looked like it was going to work, but then it gave the same error. I'm at about a 3 out of 10 on my Linux familiarity. EC2 uses the yum package manager, and trying yum remove pip did not find the package.

Answer 1

try this

sudo python -m pip install --force-reinstall pip==8.1.1