Today is my birthday! And what best birthday gift than solving you installation issue? Thank goodness the problem was solved after spending at least 5 hours trying to figure out what was happening with Compute Canada (CC). I had already created an installation script where I was able to reproduce all the steps up to my problem.

After chatting in the discussion board with @leila-pujla (the trouble-shooting expert in the group), she figured out that a configuration in my terminal might be messing up. And it was correct. There is a variable called LC_CTYPE which stores the locale, which are the set of parameters that define the language, region and any special variant preference that the user wants to see in the interface. For example, certain languages have a special locale as their native language requires special characters. That's reason of the 'locale'.

The problem appears to be that my LC_CTYPE had the value of UTF-8 which stands for ASCII enconding. However, the locale required in Compute Canada is en_US.UTF-8 and because of this little problem and to be honest quite unrelated with the type of errors that I was receiving from a Python package installation error :sweat_smile:. After the script below, the problem was solved in CC.

My sucessful installation script:

$ module load python/3.6
$ activate env
$ update pip
$ module load scipy-stack
$ export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

The definite way to solve the problem was to paste the last line of code in my .bash_profile and this way the problem was solved.

Still, there are some commands that I need to run every time I log in to CC in order to access the virtual environment and dependencies that IOData and Databases require.

source ~/envs/env_database/bin/activate ;
module load python/3.6 ;
pip install --no-index --upgrade pip ;
module load scipy-stack ;

Another useful Linux code that I used to compress and uncompress .TAR files:

compress file -> tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file
unzip file -> tar -zxvf ex01_h2o.tar.gz