How do I find the location of my Python site-packa

Question

How do I find the location of my site-packages directory?

Answer 1

>>> import site; site.getsitepackages()
['/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages']

(or just first item with site.getsitepackages()[0])

Answer 2

As others have noted, distutils.sysconfig has the relevant settings:

import distutils.sysconfig
print distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib()

...though the default site.py does something a bit more crude, paraphrased below:

import sys, os
print os.sep.join([sys.prefix, 'lib', 'python' + sys.version[:3], 'site-packages'])

(it also adds ${sys.prefix}/lib/site-python and adds both paths for sys.exec_prefix as well, should that constant be different).

That said, what's the context? You shouldn't be messing with your site-packages directly; setuptools/distutils will work for installation, and your program may be running in a virtualenv where your pythonpath is completely user-local, so it shouldn't assume use of the system site-packages directly either.

Answer 3

All the answers (or: the same answer repeated over and over) are inadequate. What you want to do is this:

from setuptools.command.easy_install import easy_install
class easy_install_default(easy_install):
  """ class easy_install had problems with the fist parameter not being
      an instance of Distribution, even though it was. This is due to
      some import-related mess.
      """

  def __init__(self):
    from distutils.dist import Distribution
    dist = Distribution()
    self.distribution = dist
    self.initialize_options()
    self._dry_run = None
    self.verbose = dist.verbose
    self.force = None
    self.help = 0
    self.finalized = 0

e = easy_install_default()
import distutils.errors
try:
  e.finalize_options()
except distutils.errors.DistutilsError:
  pass

print e.install_dir

The final line shows you the installation dir. Works on Ubuntu, whereas the above ones don't. Don't ask me about windows or other dists, but since it's the exact same dir that easy_install uses by default, it's probably correct everywhere where easy_install works (so, everywhere, even macs). Have fun. Note: original code has many swearwords in it.

Answer 4

from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib
print get_python_lib()

Answer 5

For Ubuntu,

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

...is not correct.

It will point you to /usr/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

This folder only contains packages your operating system has automatically installed for programs to run.

On ubuntu, the site-packages folder that contains packages installed via setup_tools\easy_install\pip will be in /usr/local/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

The second folder is probably the more useful one if the use case is related to installation or reading source code.

If you do not use Ubuntu, you are probably safe copy-pasting the first code box into the terminal.

Answer 6

This should work on all distributions in and out of virtual environment due to it's "low-tech" nature. The os module always resides in the parent directory of 'site-packages'

import os; print(os.path.dirname(os.__file__) + '/site-packages')

To change dir to the site-packages dir I use the following alias (on *nix systems):

alias cdsp='cd $(python -c "import os; print(os.path.dirname(os.__file__))"); cd site-packages'