Question

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?

Answer 1

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.