How do I install a pip package globally instead of locally?

Question

Why don't you try sudo with the H flag? This should do the trick.

sudo -H pip install flake8

A regular sudo pip install flake8 will try to use your own home directory. The -H instructs it to use the system's home directory. More info at https://stackoverflow.com/a/43623102/

Maybe --force-reinstall would work, otherwise --ignore-installed should do the trick.

Where does pip installations happen in python?

I will give a windows solution which I was facing and took a while to solve.

First of all, in windows (I will be taking Windows as the OS here), if you do pip install <package_name>, it will be by default installed globally (if you have not activated a virtual enviroment). Once you activate a virtual enviroment and you are inside it, all pip installations will be inside that virtual enviroment.

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pip is installing the said packages but not I cannot use them?

For this pip might be giving you a warning that the pip executables like pip3.exe, pip.exe are not on your path variable. For this you might add this path ( usually - C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\Programs\Python\ ) to your enviromental variables. After this restart your cmd, and now try to use your installed python package. It should work now.

For the Windows case:

Are you using virtualenv? If yes, deactivate the virtualenv. If you are not using a venv, the package should have already be installed on system level (system-wide). In that case, try to upgrade the package.

pip install flake8 --upgrade

I actually don‘t see your issue. Globally is any package which is in your python3 path‘s site package folder.

If you want to use it just locally then you must configure a virtualenv and reinstall the packages with an activated virtual environment.