pip - How to install Python package from GitHub?

270
votes

I want to use a new feature of httpie. This feature is in the github repo https://github.com/jkbr/httpie but not in the release on the python package index https://pypi.python.org/pypi/httpie

How can I install the httpie package from the github repo? I tried

pip install https://github.com/jkbr/httpie

But I got an error 'could not unpack'

In Nodejs, I can install packages from github like this

npm install git+https://github.com/substack/node-optimist.git
2
pythonpip
stackoverflow.com/questions/8247605/… perhaps? - Henrik Andersson

2 Answers

435
votes

You need to use the proper git URL:

pip install git+https://github.com/jkbr/httpie.git#egg=httpie

Also see the VCS Support section of the pip documentation.

Don’t forget to include the egg=<projectname> part to explicitly name the project; this way pip can track metadata for it without having to have run the setup.py script.

106
votes

To install Python package from github, you need to clone that repository.

git clone https://github.com/jkbr/httpie.git

Then just run the setup.py file from that directory,

sudo python setup.py install