error when "sudo pip" on an AWS ec2 instance

Question

I am trying to run a small python code (which requries pytz and some other packages) on a aws ec2 instance. When I tried to install pytz, I got some errors:

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-28-178 ~]$ pip install pytz
Collecting pytz
  Using cached pytz-2016.7-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: pytz
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 215, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/commands/install.py", line 342, in run
    prefix=options.prefix_path,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_set.py", line 784, in install
    **kwargs
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 851, in install
    self.move_wheel_files(self.source_dir, root=root, prefix=prefix)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 1064, in move_wheel_files
    isolated=self.isolated,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/wheel.py", line 345, in move_wheel_files
    clobber(source, lib_dir, True)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/wheel.py", line 316, in clobber
    ensure_dir(destdir)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/utils/__init__.py", line 83,  in ensure_dir
    os.makedirs(path)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/os.py", line 157, in makedirs
    mkdir(name, mode)
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pytz-2016.7.dist-info'

I followed the accepted answer of this topic but got another error:

sudo:pip: command not found

Then I found out it might be because the path setting is wrong (according to this page. But I could not manage to Just add ~/.local/bin to your path as suggested by the second answer.

Can someone show me how to add the bin to my path? I have no idea.

And some more info:

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-28-178 ug]$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/aws/bin:/home/ec2-user/.local/bin:/home/ec2-user/bin
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-28-178 ug]$ which pip
/usr/local/bin/pip
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-28-178 ug]$

Answer 1

The default (secure_path) for sudo is specified in /etc/sudoers.

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-28-178 ~]$ sudo grep secure_path /etc/sudoers
Defaults    secure_path = /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

Since pip is not found in that path, you are getting the not found error. Preserve your PATH when running sudo by:

sudo env "PATH=$PATH" pip install pytz

Answer 2

In general using an absolute path or alias for pip(as recommended by user Diego in comments above) seems to be a good way to know what you are really doing, on EC2 instance I used therefore:

sudo /opt/python/run/venv/bin/pip3 install pycurl