Installing pip packages to $HOME folder
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
.
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
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.