Kolibri 0.17.5 and 0.18.0a1 fail to install on Ubuntu 25.04 and Debian 13 pre-releases — "ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'cgi'" — perhaps b/c of new Python 3.13?

[holta]

@rtibbles @marcellamaki are you perhaps aware of anything like this, on emerging Python 3.13 OS's? The error is:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'cgi'"

The command is:

/usr/bin/kolibri manage provisiondevice --facility "Kolibri-in-a-Box" --superusername "Admin" --superuserpassword "changeme" --preset "formal" --language_id "en"

Both OS's (Ubuntu 25.04 and Debian 13 pre-releases) show:

# python3 --version
Python 3.13.2

Full details:

• Kolibri 0.17.5 and 0.18.0a1 fail to install on Ubuntu 25.04 and Debian 13 — perhaps b/c Python 3.13 is new in both OS's? iiab/iiab#3946

Related:

• Can Kolibri 0.17 -> 0.18 pre-release .deb files be made easily installable? 🙏 GOAL: to help pre-release QA/CI/CD! #11892 (comment)

[holta]

Very promising explanation:

"Python 3.13 removed the cgi module."

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78635741/drop-in-replacement-for-the-cgi-module

(Short term, pip install legacy-cgi is a very likely workaround?)

[jvonau]

(Short term, pip install legacy-cgi is a very likely workaround?)

Not likely with the way pip is wired not to install into the system path, you are installing kolibri via apt packaging. Would need to use a virtual environment to be able to use pip.

[jvonau]

Seems like I can't install the latest release with pip.
Create a virtual environment first then
. /usr/local/kolibri/bin/activate

(kolibri) jvonau@box:/opt/iiab/iiab $ pip install kolibri
Collecting kolibri
Downloading kolibri-0.15.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl.metadata (1.6 kB)
Downloading kolibri-0.15.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (100.5 MB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╺━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 59.0/100.5 MB 4.6 MB/s eta 0:00:09
ERROR: Operation cancelled by user
deactivate

Why the heck is 0.15.1 being downloaded when 0.17.5 is available at:

• https://pypi.org/project/kolibri/
• https://pypi.org/simple/kolibri/
• https://www.piwheels.org/simple/kolibri
  is the $64 question.

[marcellamaki]

Hi @holta - I'm sorry you're encountering problems. Kolibri doesn't have python 3.13 support yet, because as you point out, we need to forward-port cgi compatibility. It is in progress for our upcoming release: #12682.

I am going to close this out as it's already being tracked.

@jvonau - so far I haven't been able to replicate what you're seeing, and I was able to pip install 0.17.5 without issue:

pip install kolibri
Collecting kolibri
  Downloading kolibri-0.17.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl (102.1 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 102.1 MB 59 kB/s 
Installing collected packages: kolibri
Successfully installed kolibri-0.17.5

If you continue to run into problems with this, please share additional details in a new issue to reduce confusion. Thank you!

[jvonau]

Was completely related to using python3.13 but does install with --ignore-requires-python, otherwise works fine. Sorry for the noise.