Question

Is there a way to check programmatically, from Python, if the user has setuptools’s “easy_install” available or the distribute version of “easy_install”?

I’d like to know which of those is available (and ideally which is “in-use” by the system.)

How can this be done? thanks.

Answer 1

For easy-install based

>>> import pkg_resources
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('setuptools')
setuptools 0.6c11 (t:\tmp\easyinstall\lib\site-packages\setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg)
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('setuptools').project_name
'setuptools'

For distribute based

>>> import pkg_resources
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('setuptools')
distribute 0.6.31 (t:\tmp\distribute\lib\site-packages\distribute-0.6.31-py2.7.egg)
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('setuptools').project_name
'distribute'