What is the purpose of pip install --user

Question

From pip install --help  --user  Install to the Python user install directory for your platform           Typically    local   or  APPDATA  Python on Windows            See the Python documentation for site USER BASE for full details    The documentation for site USER BASE is a terrifying wormhole of interesting  NIX subject matter that I don t understand  What is the purpose of --user in plain english  Why would intalling the package to    local  matter  Why not just put an executable somewhere in my  PATH

User · Answer

Just a warning    According to this issue  --user is currently not valid inside a virtual env s pip  since a user location doesn t really make sense for a virtual environment   So do not use pip install --user some pkg inside a virtual environment  otherwise  virtual environment s pip will be confused  See this answer for more details

User · Answer

Why not just put an executable somewhere in my  PATH      local bin directory is theoretically expected to be in your  PATH    According to these people it s a bug not adding it in the  PATH when using systemd   This answer explains it more extensively   But even if your distro includes the    local bin directory to the  PATH  it might be in the following form  inside    profile     if   -d   HOME  local bin      then     PATH   HOME  local bin  PATH  fi   which would require you to logout and login again  if the directory was not there before

User · Answer

Without Virtual Environments pip  lt command gt  --user changes the scope of the current pip command to work on the current user account s local python package install location  rather than the system-wide package install location  which is the default   See User Installs in the PIP User Guide   This only really matters on a multi-user machine  Anything installed to the system location will be visible to all users  so installing to the user location will keep that package installation separate from other users  they will not see it  and would have to install it themselves separately to use it   Because there can be version conflicts  installing a package with dependencies needed by other packages can cause problems  so it s best not to push all packages a given user uses to the system install location   If it is a single-user machine  there is little or no difference to installing to the --user location  It will be installed to a different folder  that may or may not need to be added to the path  depending on the package and how it s used  many packages install command-line tools that must be on the path to run from a shell   If it is a multi-user machine  --user is preferred to using root sudo or requiring administrator installation and affecting the Python environment of every user  except in cases of general packages that the administrator wants to make available to all users by default   Note  Per comments  on most Unix Linux installs it has been pointed out that system installs should use the general package manager  such as apt  rather than pip      With Virtual Environments  See more about installing packages with virtual environments in the Python Packaging documentation  Read about how to create and use virtual environments  and the venv command in the Python VENV docs   The --user option in an active venv virtualenv environment will install to the local user python location  same as without a virtual environment   Packages are installed to the virtual environment by default  but if you use --user it will force it to install outside the virtual environments  in the users python script directory  in Windows  this currently is c  users  lt username gt  appdata roaming python python37 scripts for me with Python 3 7   However  you won t be able to access a system or user install from within virtual environment  even if you used --user while in a virtual environment   If you install a virtual environment with the --system-site-packages argument  you will have access to the system script folder for python  I believe this included the user python script folder as well  but I m unsure  However  there may be unintended consequences for this and it is not the intended way to use virtual environments   Location of the Python System and Local User Install Folders You can find the location of the user install folder for python with python -m site --user-base  I m finding conflicting information in Q amp A s  the documentation and actually using this command on my PC as to what the defaults are  but they are underneath the user home directory    shortcut in  nix  and c  users  lt username gt  typically for Windows    Other Details The --user option is not a valid for every command  For example pip uninstall will find and uninstall packages wherever they were installed  in the user folder  virtual environment folder  etc   and the --user option is not valid  Things installed with pip install --user will be installed in a local location that will only be seen by the current user account  and will not require root access  on  nix  or administrator access  on Windows   The --user option modifies all pip commands that accept it to see operate on the user install folder  so if you use pip list --user it will only show you packages installed with pip install --user

User · Answer

Other answers mention site USER SITE as where Python packages get placed  If you re looking for binaries  these go in  site USER BASE  bin   If you want to add this directory to your shell s search path  use   export PATH    PATH    python3 -c  import site  print site USER BASE    bin

User · Answer

pip defaults to installing Python packages to a system directory  such as  usr local lib python3 4   This requires root access   --user makes pip install packages in your home directory instead  which doesn t require any special privileges

User · Answer

--user installs in site USER SITE   For my case  it was  Users     Library Python 2 7 bin  So I have added that to my PATH  in    bash profile file    export PATH  PATH  Users     Library Python 2 7 bin

User · Answer

On macOS  the reason for using the --user flag is to make sure we don t corrupt the libraries the OS relies on   A conservative approach for many macOS users is to avoid installing or updating pip with a command that requires sudo   Thus  this includes installing to  usr local bin      Ref  Installing python for Neovim  https   github com zchee deoplete-jedi wiki Setting-up-Python-for-Neovim   I m not all clear why installing into  usr local bin is a risk on a Mac given the fact that the system only relies on python binaries in  Library Frameworks  and  usr bin   I suspect it s because as noted above  installing into  usr local bin requires sudo which opens the door to making a costly mistake with the system libraries   Thus  installing into    local bin is a sure fire way to avoid this risk   Ref  Using python on a Mac  https   docs python org 2 using mac html   Finally  to the degree there is a benefit of installing packages into the  usr local bin  I wonder if it makes sense to change the owner of the directory from root to user   This would avoid having to use sudo while still protecting against making system-dependent changes    Is this a security default a relic of how Unix systems were more often used in the past  as servers   Or at minimum  just a good way to go for Mac users not hosting a server    Note  Mac s System Integrity Protection  SIP  feature also seems to protect the user from changing the system-dependent libraries   - E

User · Answer

Best way to is install virtualenv and not require the --user confusion  You will get more flexibility and not worry about clobbering the different python versions and projects everytime you pip install a package   https   virtualenv pypa io en stable

[python] What is the purpose of "pip install --user ..."?

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