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

A side-note: The proposed solution (distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib()) does not work when there is more than one site-packages directory (as recommended by this article). It will only return the main site-packages directory.

Alas, I have no better solution either. Python doesn't seem to keep track of site-packages directories, just the packages within them.

Answer 2

This is what worked for me:

python -m site --user-site

Answer 3

From "How to Install Django" documentation (though this is useful to more than just Django installation) - execute the following from the shell:

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

Formatted for readability (rather than use as a one-liner), that looks like the following:

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

Answer 4

If it is already added to the PYTHONPATH you can also do something like

import sys
print('\n'.join(sys.path))

Answer 5

There are two types of site-packages directories, global and per user.

1. Global site-packages ("dist-packages") directories are listed in sys.path when you run:

   python -m site
   

   For a more concise list run getsitepackages from the site module in Python code:

   python -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages())"
   

   Note: With virtualenvs getsitepackages is not available, sys.path from above will list the virtualenv's site-packages directory correctly, though.

2. The per user site-packages directory (PEP 370) is where Python installs your local packages:

   python -m site --user-site
   

   If this points to a non-existing directory check the exit status of Python and see python -m site --help for explanations.

   Hint: Running pip list --user or pip freeze --user gives you a list of all installed per user site-packages.

Answer 6

I had to do something slightly different for a project I was working on: find the relative site-packages directory relative to the base install prefix. If the site-packages folder was in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages, I wanted the /lib/python2.7/site-packages part. I have, in fact, encountered systems where site-packages was in /usr/lib64, and the accepted answer did NOT work on those systems.

Similar to cheater's answer, my solution peeks deep into the guts of Distutils, to find the path that actually gets passed around inside setup.py. It was such a pain to figure out that I don't want anyone to ever have to figure this out again.

import sys
import os
from distutils.command.install import INSTALL_SCHEMES

if os.name == 'nt':
    scheme_key = 'nt'
else:
    scheme_key = 'unix_prefix'

print(INSTALL_SCHEMES[scheme_key]['purelib'].replace('$py_version_short', (str.split(sys.version))[0][0:3]).replace('$base', ''))

That should print something like /Lib/site-packages or /lib/python3.6/site-packages.