How to install virtualenv without using sudo?

Question

I have easy_install and pip.

I had many errors on my Linux Mint 12, I just re-installed it and I want to install everything from scratch again.

This is one of the errors that I had. I received an interesting answer there:

Stop using su and sudo to run virtualenv.
You need to run virtualenv as your normal user.
You have created the virtualenv with sudo which is why you are getting these errors.

So how to install virtualenv without using sudo? Can i use pipor easy_install without using sudo? Or is there another way?

Answer 1

I've created a "portable" version of virtualenv.

wget https://bitbucket.org/techtonik/locally/raw/tip/06.get-virtualenv.py
python 06.get-virtualenv.py

It downloads virtualenv.py script with dependencies into .locally subdir and executes it from there. Once that's done, the script with .locally/ subdir can be copied anywhere.

Answer 2

This solution is suitable in cases where no virtualenv is available system wide and you can not become root to install virtualenv. When I set up a debian for python development or deployment I always apt-get install python-virtualenv. It is more convenient to have it around than to do the bootstrap pointed out below. But without root power it may be the the way to go:

There is a bootstrap mechanism that should get you going.

Read: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#creating-a-virtual-python

In essence you would do this in your home directory in a unix environment:

Given your python is version 2.6

    $ mkdir ~/bin
    $ mkdir -p ~/lib/python2.6
    $ mkdir -p ~/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages
    $ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/virtual-python.py
    $ python virtual-python.py --no-site-packages
    $ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
    $ ~/bin/python ez_setup.py
    $ ~/local/bin/easy_install virtualenv
    $ ~/local/bin/virtualenv --no-site-packages thereyouare

There may be room for optimization. I don't like the local path. Just bin and lib would be nice. But it does its job.

Answer 3

http://opensourcehacker.com/2012/09/16/recommended-way-for-sudo-free-installation-of-python-software-with-virtualenv/ suggests the following:

curl -L -o virtualenv.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
python virtualenv.py vvv-venv
. vvv-venv/bin/activate
pip install vvv

It seems to work well. It lets me install https://github.com/miohtama/vvv with pip.

If you get:

Cannot find sdist setuptools-*.tar.gz
Cannot find sdist pip-*.tar.gz

Try --extra-search-dir after downloading the tarballs at https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/tree/develop/virtualenv_support

Answer 4

You can also use the command below, it worked for me without sudo access. You may also need to modify your PYTHONPATH environment variable using export, see this SO answer for more details.

pip install --user virtualenv

Answer 5

You might want to consider using Anaconda. It's a full-fledged Python distribution, that lives in a folder in e.g. your home directory. No sudo is necessary at any point and you get most of the popular packages.

$ wget https://.../Anaconda2-2.5.0-Linux-x86_64.sh # check the website for the exact URL, it can change
$ bash Anaconda2-2.5.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
$ conda install virtualenv

Answer 6

The easiest way I have seen so far is to install Anaconda. It may be an overkill for you. For me the centOS running on the remote server had only python2.6 installed. Anaconda by default installs everything locally + it is python2.7

curl -O https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

Then

bash Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

Boom. You have all the packages like numpy and pip installed. Then if you want virtualenv, just type

pip install virtualenv