Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman shares a slew of reasons why mssql-cli might fail to install:
The easiest scenario for many to deploy SQL Server 2019 on Linux to start working with it, is most likely an Ubuntu distribution, (flavor) of Linux. With that, you may want to play with the newest tool for command line execution of SQL, which isn’t sqlcmd, but mssql-cli. It’s got some awesome new features, which I won’t go into here, but focus on installation failures instead, which happens not because the installation is complicated but because of the demands still for Python 2.7 when 3+ versions are required for newer software.
mssql-cli requires Python 3, so I recommend checking the version before running the mssql-cli installation command, as this may save you a lot of work with dependencies. I’ll still go through the steps to if you want to force it to work with Python 2.7, but seriously, just using the right version of Python will make it so much easier.
Read on for just shy of a dozen different failure modes.