Install a Python package into a different directory using pip?

Question

I know the obvious answer is to use virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, but for various reasons I can\'t/don\'t want to do that.

So how do I modify the command

Answer 1

To add to the already good advice, as I had an issue installing IPython when I didn't have write permissions to /usr/local.

pip uses distutils to do its install and this thread discusses how that can cause a problem as it relies on the sys.prefix setting.

My issue happened when the IPython install tried to write to '/usr/local/share/man/man1' with Permission denied. As the install failed it didn't seem to write the IPython files in the bin directory.

Using "--user" worked and the files were written to ~/.local. Adding ~/.local/bin to the $PATH meant I could use "ipython" from there.

However I'm trying to install this for a number of users and had been given write permission to the /usr/local/lib/python2.7 directory. I created a "bin" directory under there and set directives for distutils:

vim ~/.pydistutils.cfg

[install]
install-data=/usr/local/lib/python2.7
install-scripts=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/bin

then (-I is used to force the install despite previous failures/.local install):

pip install -I ipython

Then I added /usr/local/lib/python2.7/bin to $PATH.

I thought I'd include this in case anyone else has similar issues on a machine they don't have sudo access to.