python - Installing pip packages to $HOME folder

330
votes

Is it possible? When installing pip, install the python packages inside my $HOME folder. (for example, I want to install mercurial, using pip, but inside $HOME instead of /usr/local)

I'm with a mac machine and just thought about this possibility, instead of "polluting" my /usr/local, I would use my $HOME instead.

PEP370 is exactly about this. Is just creating a ˜/.local and do a pip install package enough to make these packages to be installed only at my $HOME folder?

3
pythonpip
Have you checked out virtualenv? You could install packages with pip in an isolated environment. – joet3ch
I thought about it, but I would like to install some python applications using the existing python (2.6.1), but instead of installing at /usr/local/, install at my $HOME folder and add it to $PATH. I want to know if it's possible, and any caveats of this approach. – Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
+1 for promoting PEP370. This is a simple but useful option that more people should know about. – Ned Deily
I was fighting with similar problem (possibly caused by misconfigured pip and easy_install for two different pyhtons). As last resort, I tried to use plain $ python setup.py --user install. And it worked. Package is now installed at home subdir and all works as expected. Will have to talk to my server admin. – Jan Vlcinsky
If you need to install PIP, just do something like wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py followed by python get-pip.py and you're good to go. Might be useful if you're on a machine where the installed PIP is too old (was the case for me). See pip.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installing.html for more info. – Markus

3 Answers

467
votes

While you can use a virtualenv, you don't need to. The trick is passing the PEP370 --user argument to the setup.py script. With the latest version of pip, one way to do it is:

pip install --user mercurial

This should result in the hg script being installed in $HOME/.local/bin/hg and the rest of the hg package in $HOME/.local/lib/pythonx.y/site-packages/.

Note, that the above is true for Python 2.6. There has been a bit of controversy among the Python core developers about what is the appropriate directory location on Mac OS X for PEP370-style user installations. In Python 2.7 and 3.2, the location on Mac OS X was changed from $HOME/.local to $HOME/Library/Python. This might change in a future release. But, for now, on 2.7 (and 3.2, if hg were supported on Python 3), the above locations will be $HOME/Library/Python/x.y/bin/hg and $HOME/Library/Python/x.y/lib/python/site-packages.

21
votes

I would use virtualenv at your HOME directory.

$ sudo easy_install -U virtualenv
$ cd ~
$ virtualenv .
$ bin/pip ...

You could then also alter ~/.(login|profile|bash_profile), whichever is right for your shell to add ~/bin to your PATH and then that pip|python|easy_install would be the one used by default.

20
votes

You can specify the -t option (--target) to specify the destination directory. See pip install --help for detailed information. This is the command you need: 

pip install -t path_to_your_home package-name

for example, for installing say mxnet, in my $HOME directory, I type: 

pip install -t /home/foivos/ mxnet