What is the official “preferred” way to install pi

Question

Is it this, which people seem to recommend most often:

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install pip
$ sudo pip install virtualenv

Or this, which I got from http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html:

$ curl -O https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/raw/master/virtualenv.py
$ python virtualenv.py my_new_env
$ . my_new_env/bin/activate
(my_new_env)$ pip install ...

Or something entirely different?

Answer 1

The former method is fine. The only problem I can see is that you might end up with an old version of setuptools (if the apt repository hasn't been kept up-to-date..

Answer 2

I use get-pip and virtualenv-burrito to install all this. Not sure if python-setuptools is required.

# might be optional. I install as part of my standard ubuntu setup script
sudo apt-get -y install python-setuptools

# install pip (using get-pip.py from pip contrib)
curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/develop/contrib/get-pip.py && sudo python get-pip.py

# one-line virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper using virtualenv-burrito
curl -s https://raw.github.com/brainsik/virtualenv-burrito/master/virtualenv-burrito.sh | bash

Answer 3

To install pip on a mac (osx), the following one liner worked great for me:

sudo easy_install pip

Answer 4

Starting from distro packages, you can either use:

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

which lets you create virtualenvs, or

sudo apt-get install python{,3}-pip

which lets you install arbitrary packages to your home directory.

If you're used to virtualenv, the first command gives you everything you need (remember, pip is bundled and will be installed in any virtualenv you create).

If you just want to install packages, the second command gives you what you need. Use pip like this:

pip install --user something

and put something like

PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

in your ~/.bashrc.

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If your distro is ancient and you don't want to use its packages at all (except for Python itself, probably), you can download virtualenv, either as a tarball or as a standalone script:

wget -O ~/bin/virtualenv https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
chmod +x ~/bin/virtualenv

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If your distro is more of the bleeding edge kind, Python3.3 has built-in virtualenv-like abilities:

python3 -m venv ./venv

This runs way faster, but setuptools and pip aren't included.