[python] How to change default install location for pip

I'm trying to install Pandas using pip, but I'm having a bit of trouble. I just ran sudo pip install pandas which successfully downloaded pandas. However, it did not get downloaded to the location that I wanted. Here's what I see when I use pip show pandas:

---
Name: pandas
Version: 0.14.0
Location: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pandas-0.14.0-py2.7-macosx-10.9-intel.egg
Requires: python-dateutil, pytz, numpy

So it is installed. But I was confused when I created a new Python Project and searched under System Libs/lib/python for pandas, because it didn't show up. Some of the other packages that I've downloaded in the past did show up, however, so I tried to take a look at where those were. Running pip show numpy (which I can import with no problem) yielded:

---
Name: numpy
Version: 1.6.2
Location: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python
Requires: 

Which is in a completely different directory. For the sake of confirming my error, I ran pip install pyquery to see where it would be downloaded to, and got:

Name: pyquery
Version: 1.2.8
Location: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages
Requires: lxml, cssselect

So the same place as pandas...

How do I change the default download location for pip so that these packages are downloaded to the same location that numpy is in?

Note: There were a few similar questions that I saw when searching for a solution, but I didn't see anything that mentioned permanently changing the default location.

This question is related to python pip

The answer is


Open Terminal and type:

pip config set global.target /Users/Bob/Library/Python/3.8/lib/python/site-packages

except instead of

/Users/Bob/Library/Python/3.8/lib/python/site-packages

you would use whatever directory you want.


You can set the following environment variable:

PIP_TARGET=/path/to/pip/dir

https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/user_guide/#environment-variables