diff --git a/install_rally.sh b/install_rally.sh
index 1184816ee3..b428036916 100755
--- a/install_rally.sh
+++ b/install_rally.sh
@@ -273,26 +273,26 @@ download() {
     wget -nv $VERBOSE --no-check-certificate -O "$@";
 }
 
-download_from_pypi () {
-    local pkg=$1
+download_setuptools () {
+    local url
+    # NOTE(stpierre): This (admittedly ugly) one-liner parses the JSON
+    # returned from pypi and fetches the URL for the latest version of
+    # the source (i.e., .tar.gz) package. It's safe here to look for
+    # the .tar.gz explicitly (rather than matching on package type ==
+    # source) because we untar it later anyway.
+    url=$(python -c '
+import json
+import urllib2
 
-    # NOTE(amaretskiy): get packages list in HTML
-    local packages=$(download - "${BASE_PIP_URL}/${pkg}/")
-
-    # NOTE(amaretskiy): filter packages URLs
-    packages=$(echo ${packages} | sed -En "s/.*href=\"(.*${pkg}-.*\\.gz)\#.*/\1/p")
-
-    # NOTE(amaretskiy): sort packages URLs by their version part
-    packages=$(echo ${packages} | sort -t / -k 7 -V)
-
-    # NOTE(amaretskiy): finally, the URL is in the last line
-    local url=$(echo ${packages} | tail -1)
+print [u["url"]
+       for u in json.load(urllib2.urlopen("http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools/json/"))["urls"]
+       if u["filename"].endswith(".tar.gz")].pop()')
 
     if [ -n "$url" ]; then
-        download "$(basename "$url")" "$BASE_PIP_URL"/"$pkg"/"$url"
+        download "$(basename "$url")" "$url"
     else
-        die $EX_PROTOCOL "Package '$pkg' not found on PyPI!" <<__EOF__
-Unable to download package '$pkg' from PyPI.
+        die $EX_PROTOCOL "Setuptools not found on PyPI!" <<__EOF__
+Unable to download package 'setuptools' from PyPI.
 __EOF__
     fi
 }
@@ -446,7 +446,7 @@ __EOF__
     #     Wheel installs require setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support.
     #
     if pip wheel --help 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null; then
-        (cd "$DESTDIR" && download_from_pypi setuptools)
+        (cd "$DESTDIR" && download_setuptools)
         # setup.py must be called with `python', which will be the
         # python executable inside the virtualenv, not `$PYTHON',
         # which is the system python.