Fail during installation of Pillow (Python module) in Linux

There is a bug reported for Pillow here, which indicates that libjpeg and zlib are now required as of Pillow 3.0.0.

The installation instructions for Pillow on Linux give advice of how to install these packages. Note that not all of the following packages may be missing on your machine (comments suggest that only libjpeg8-dev is actually missing).

pip / PyPi (Pillow>3.4.2)

The latest releases of Pillow are available on PyPi as wheels — the new standard packaging mechanism for Python. These prebuilt packages include all neccessary binary dependencies to allow Pillow to run and should be used if you want to install Pillow using PyPi

To use wheels, you need to have a version of pip>=1.4. If you are using an earlier version (pip --version) upgrade pip using the following:

pip install --upgrade pip 

Once pip is upgraded, pip install will use platform-specific wheel files by default if they are available. Use the following command to upgrade Pillow to the latest version available on PyPi:

pip install --upgrade pillow

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or Raspian Wheezy 7.0

sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk

Ubuntu 14.04

sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev python-tk

Ubuntu 18.04

sudo apt install libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev

Fedora 20

The Fedora 20 equivalent of libjpeg8-dev is libjpeg-devel.

sudo yum install libtiff-devel libjpeg-devel libzip-devel freetype-devel lcms2-devel libwebp-devel tcl-devel tk-devel

Mac OS X (via Homebrew)

On Mac OS X with Homebrew this can be fixed using:

brew install libjpeg zlib

You may also need to force-link zlib using the following:

brew link zlib --force

Update April 2019: In Mojave the above will not work and you need to run the following as taken from this bug report on Pillow

sudo installer -pkg /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg -target /

Update July 2016: There is no longer a formula for zlib available in the main repository (Homebrew will prompt you to install lzlib which is a different library and will not solve this problem).

There is a formula available in the dupes repository. You can either tap this repository, and install as normal:

brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install zlib

Or you can install zlib via xcode instead, as follows:

xcode-select --install

Thanks to phoenix, Panos Angelopoulou, nelsonvarela, benjaminz and Kal in the comments

After these are installed the pip installation of Pillow should work normally.

Thank you @mfitzp. In my case (CentOS) these libs are not available in the yum repo, but actually the solution was even easier. What I did:

sudo yum install python-devel
sudo yum install zlib-devel
sudo yum install libjpeg-turbo-devel

And now pillow's installation finishes successfully.

On Raspberry pi II, I had the same problem. After trying the following, I solved the problem. The solution is:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev

The quickest fix is upgrate the pip. Did worked for me:

pip install --upgrade pip