[smokinimages]

I had the same issue and it was a pita to track down. Within your virtual env go to lib/site-packages/zappa and edit the cli.py file. Add import pip at the start of the imports. Seems there is an issue where if the requests library is imported before pip and you get this error

ie
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from __future__ import division
from past.builtins import basestring
from builtins import input, bytes

import pip 
import argcomplete
import argparse

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