What is python s site-packages directory

Question

The directory site-packages is mentioned in various Python related articles  What is it  How to use it

User · Answer

site-packages is just the location where Python installs its modules.

No need to "find it", python knows where to find it by itself, this location is always part of the PYTHONPATH (sys.path).

Programmatically you can find it this way:

import sys
site_packages = next(p for p in sys.path if 'site-packages' in p)
print site_packages

'/Users/foo/.envs/env1/lib/python2.7/site-packages'

User · Answer

site-packages is the target directory of manually built Python packages  When you build and install Python packages from source  using distutils  probably by executing python setup py install   you will find the installed modules in site-packages by default   There are standard locations    Unix  pure 1  prefix lib pythonX Y site-packages Unix  non-pure   exec-prefix lib pythonX Y site-packages Windows  prefix Lib site-packages   1 Pure means that the module uses only Python code  Non-pure can contain C C   code as well   site-packages is by default part of the Python search path  so modules installed there can be imported easily afterwards     Useful reading   Installing Python Modules  for Python 2  Installing Python Modules  for Python 3

User · Answer

When you use --user option with pip  the package gets installed in user s folder instead of global folder and you won t need to run pip command with admin privileges    The location of user s packages folder can be found using   python -m site --user-site   This will print something like   C  Users  USERNAME  AppData Roaming Python Python35 site-packages   When you don t use --user option with pip  the package gets installed in global folder given by   python -c  import site  print site getsitepackages       This will print something like     C   Program Files  Anaconda3    C   Program Files  Anaconda3  lib  site-packages    Note  Above printed values are for On Windows 10 with Anaconda 4 x installed with defaults

[python] What is python's site-packages directory?

Examples related to python