Pandas doesn't recognize Pyarrow as a Parquet engine even though it's installed

I didn’t have multiple versions of pyarrow installed.

I uninstalled via conda, verified I didn’t have pyarrow from pip, reinstalled via conda, and got the same error:

brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ conda uninstall pyarrow parquet-cpp
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: done

## Package Plan ##

  environment location: /home/brandon/miniconda3

  removed specs:
    - parquet-cpp
    - pyarrow


The following packages will be REMOVED:

  parquet-cpp-1.5.1-1
  pyarrow-0.11.1-py36hbbcf98d_1002


Proceed ([y]/n)? y

Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: done
Executing transaction: done
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ pip uninstall pyarrow
Skipping pyarrow as it is not installed.
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ python -c 'import pyarrow'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pyarrow'
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ pip show pyarrow
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ conda list pyarrow
# packages in environment at /home/brandon/miniconda3:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ conda install -y pyarrow
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: done

## Package Plan ##

  environment location: /home/brandon/miniconda3

  added / updated specs:
    - pyarrow


The following NEW packages will be INSTALLED:

  parquet-cpp        conda-forge/noarch::parquet-cpp-1.5.1-2
  pyarrow            conda-forge/linux-64::pyarrow-0.12.0-py36hbbcf98d_2

The following packages will be UPDATED:

  arrow-cpp                        0.11.1-py36h0e61e49_1004 --> 0.12.0-py36h0e61e49_0


Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: done
Executing transaction: done
brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ python -c 'import pyarrow'

And then

brandon@datascience-dev:~
$ jupyter console

Jupyter console 6.0.0

Python 3.6.6 | packaged by conda-forge | (default, Oct 12 2018, 14:08:43)
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 7.1.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.



In [1]: import pandas as pd

In [2]: pd.io.parquet.PyArrowImpl()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
~/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/io/parquet.py in __init__(self)
     82             import pyarrow
---> 83             import pyarrow.parquet
     84         except ImportError:

~/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyarrow/parquet.py in <module>
     29 import pyarrow.lib as lib
---> 30 import pyarrow._parquet as _parquet
     31

ImportError: /home/brandon/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyarrow/../../../libparquet.so.12: undefined symbol: _ZNK5boost16re_detail_10680031cpp_regex_traits_implementationIcE17transform_primaryB5cxx11EPKcS4_

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-2-9b1c87fa6892> in <module>
----> 1 pd.io.parquet.PyArrowImpl()

~/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/io/parquet.py in __init__(self)
     84         except ImportError:
     85             raise ImportError(
---> 86                 "pyarrow is required for parquet support\n\n"
     87                 "you can install via conda\n"
     88                 "conda install pyarrow -c conda-forge\n"

ImportError: pyarrow is required for parquet support

you can install via conda
conda install pyarrow -c conda-forge

or via pip
pip install -U pyarrow

I got it working by uninstalling via conda and installing with pip:

$ pip install -U pyarrow
Collecting pyarrow
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/42/be/8682e7f6c12dd42f31f32b18d5d61b4f578f12aaa9058081aef954a481d3/pyarrow-0.12.0-cp36-cp36m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (12.5MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 12.5MB 6.0MB/s
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: six>=1.0.0 in /home/brandon/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages (from pyarrow) (1.11.0)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: numpy>=1.14 in /home/brandon/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages (from pyarrow) (1.15.4)
Installing collected packages: pyarrow
Successfully installed pyarrow-0.12.0
brandon@datascience-dev:~/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages
$ python
Python 3.6.7 | packaged by conda-forge | (default, Nov 21 2018, 03:09:43)
[GCC 7.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.io.parquet.PyArrowImpl()
<pandas.io.parquet.PyArrowImpl object at 0x7fc8ab9ee0f0>

So it appears that there’s something off about that specific conda version.