Error when updating poetry

[arturomoncadatorres]

I had poetry v.2.0.1 installed. I had it configured so that poetry would be in charge of package management while conda would still be in charge of environment management. I have used this setup for several months without an issue.

Today, I tried to update poetry by doing

poetry self update

and got the following error

Updating Poetry version ...

Using version ^2.1.4 for poetry

Updating dependencies
Resolving dependencies... (6.4s)

Package operations: 9 installs, 22 updates, 0 removals

  - Updating certifi (2024.12.14 -> 2025.8.3)
  - Installing h11 (0.16.0)
  - Installing sniffio (1.3.1)
  - Installing typing-extensions (4.15.0)
  - Installing anyio (4.10.0)
  - Updating charset-normalizer (3.4.1 -> 3.4.3)
  - Installing httpcore (1.0.9)
  - Updating more-itertools (10.6.0 -> 10.8.0)
  - Updating urllib3 (2.3.0 -> 2.5.0)
  - Updating distlib (0.3.9 -> 0.4.0)
  - Updating filelock (3.16.1 -> 3.19.1)
  - Installing httpx (0.28.1)
  - Updating jaraco-functools (4.1.0 -> 4.3.0)
  - Updating msgpack (1.1.0 -> 1.1.1)
  - Updating packaging (24.2 -> 25.0)
  - Updating platformdirs (4.3.6 -> 4.4.0)
  - Updating rapidfuzz (3.11.0 -> 3.14.1)
  - Updating requests (2.32.3 -> 2.32.5)
  - Installing zstandard (0.24.0)
  - Updating build (1.2.2.post1 -> 1.3.0)
  - Updating cachecontrol (0.14.2 -> 0.14.3)
  - Updating dulwich (0.22.7 -> 0.22.8)
  - Updating fastjsonschema (2.21.1 -> 2.21.2)
  - Installing findpython (0.6.3)
  - Installing pbs-installer (2025.9.2)
  - Updating pkginfo (1.12.0 -> 1.12.1.2)
  - Updating poetry-core (2.0.1 -> 2.1.3)
  - Updating tomlkit (0.13.2 -> 0.13.3)
  - Updating trove-classifiers (2025.1.15.22 -> 2025.9.9.12)
  - Updating virtualenv (20.29.1 -> 20.32.0)
  - Updating poetry (2.0.1 -> 2.1.4): Failed

  CalledProcessError

  Command '['C:\\Users\\XXXXXXX\\pipx\\venvs\\poetry\\Scripts\\python.exe', 'C:\\Users\\XXXXXXX\\pipx\\venvs\\poetry\\Lib\\site-packages\\virtualenv\\seed\\wheels\\embed\\pip-24.3.1-py3-none-any.whl\\pip', 'uninstall', 'poetry', '-y']' returned non-zero exit status 2.

  at ~\AppData\Local\miniforge3\Lib\subprocess.py:571 in run
       567│             # We don't call process.wait() as .__exit__ does that for us.
       568│             raise
       569│         retcode = process.poll()
       570│         if check and retcode:
    →  571│             raise CalledProcessError(retcode, process.args,
       572│                                      output=stdout, stderr=stderr)
       573│     return CompletedProcess(process.args, retcode, stdout, stderr)
       574│
       575│

The following error occurred when trying to handle this error:


  EnvCommandError

  Command ['C:\\Users\\XXXXXXX\\pipx\\venvs\\poetry\\Scripts\\python.exe', 'C:\\Users\\XXXXXXX\\pipx\\venvs\\poetry\\Lib\\site-packages\\virtualenv\\seed\\wheels\\embed\\pip-24.3.1-py3-none-any.whl\\pip', 'uninstall', 'poetry', '-y'] errored with the following return code 2

  Output:
  C:\Users\XXXXXXX\AppData\Local\miniforge3\python.exe: can't open file 'C:\\Users\\XXXXXXX\\pipx\\venvs\\poetry\\Lib\\site-packages\\virtualenv\\seed\\wheels\\embed\\pip-24.3.1-py3-none-any.whl\\pip': [Errno 2] No such file or directory


  at ~\pipx\venvs\poetry\Lib\site-packages\poetry\utils\env\base_env.py:342 in _run
      338│                 output = subprocess.check_output(
      339│                     cmd, stderr=stderr, env=env, text=True, encoding=encoding, **kwargs
      340│                 )
      341│         except CalledProcessError as e:
    → 342│             raise EnvCommandError(e)
      343│
      344│         return output
      345│
      346│     def execute(self, bin: str, *args: str, **kwargs: Any) -> int:

Cannot install poetry.

After that, my poetry install is completely bricked and with every command I get the same error. For example:

poetry show

cannot import name 'SCHEMA_DIR' from 'poetry.core.json' (C:\Users\320271016\pipx\venvs\poetry\Lib\site-packages\poetry\core\json\__init__.py)

I tried searching for other open issues and googling with no results. Does anyone have any idea what went wrong and, most importantly, how to fix it? I suppose doing a clean install might do the trick, but if possible I would like to avoid that

[arturomoncadatorres]

I am answering my own question in case anyone runs into the same issue.

After many hours of googling and even some Copilot help, I couldn't solve it. Therefore, I had to go the nuclear option and install poetry from scratch again. I did so using pipx (which is also how I installed it the first time), but I don't know if this would solve the issue if installed using other alternatives. There was just one caveat:

The original instructions say that poetry should be installed with

pipx install poetry

However, in my case it detected that there were already some poetry files, so I had to do a force installation with

pipx install --force poetry

This installed poetry v2.1.4 with no issues, making it work again.

In retrospective, this wasn't such a hassle as I thought it was going to be. I still don't know what caused the issue on the first place, though.