I have been using the standard python that comes with OS X Lion (2.7.2) but I wanted to build a UCS-4 version to handle 4-byte unicode characters better.
I had already installed pip and packages like pytz, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, etc., and these are installed in /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages. My $PATH is /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin.
To build a new version of python on the machine (outside of any project specific virtual environments, that will come later), I followed the instructions on this article and managed to build it in /usr/local/bin. The problem is that when I launched a new bash window, I got the following virtualenvwrapper error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks.
If Python could not import the module virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader, check that virtualenv has been installed for VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python and that PATH is set properly.
The instructions said to move /usr/local/bin to the top of the /etc/paths file, and since then I’ve noticed some strange issues. I installed pip into /usr/local/bin and now I have assumed that since I’m working in /usr/local/bin, and the newly installed python’s site packages is now located in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages, when I do pip freeze, it should be empty as nothing is installed there yet. However, pip freeze still reports things installed in the old (OS X) site-packages folder. Here’s some info after the build:
$ which python
/usr/local/bin/python
$ which pip
/usr/local/bin/pip
$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
When I uninstall a python package with pip, it removes it from the old site-packages folder as expected. When I install it again, instead of installing it in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages, it installs it in /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages (verified by attempting to install it again and receiving Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pytz in /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages). How is it getting that path for the old site-packages folder? Why won’t it install it in the correct location for the python install it’s using?
I’m getting several other issues since promoting /usr/local/bin but I think if I understand this I’ll be able to get somewhere.
Can anyone see what’s happening? If you need any more info I’ll be happy to provide it.
Since you will be using the custom python installation as your main one, I suggest you uninstall all non-standard packages from the system python and make sure that the existing easy_install.py is gone (possibly by manually removing it). Then download distribute’s distribute_setup.py and run it with the new interpreter. From then on everything should work as expected.