How do I install Python packages on Windows?

Question

The accepted answer is outdated. So first, pip is preferred over easy_install, (Why use pip over easy_install?). Then follow these steps to install pip on Windows, it's quite easy.

1. Install setuptools:

   curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py | python
   

2. Install pip:

   curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python
   

3. Optionally, you can add the path to your environment so that you can use pip anywhere. It's somewhere like C:\Python33\Scripts.

Newer versions of Python for Windows come with the pip package manager. (source)

pip is already installed if you're using Python 2 >=2.7.9 or Python 3 >=3.4

Use that to install packages:

cd C:\Python\Scripts\
pip.exe install <package-name>

So in your case it'd be:

pip.exe install mechanize

This is a good tutorial on how to get easy_install on windows. The short answer: add C:\Python26\Scripts (or whatever python you have installed) to your PATH.

You don't need the executable for setuptools. You can download the source code, unpack it, traverse to the downloaded directory and run python setup.py install in the command prompt

Starting with Python 2.7, pip is included by default. Simply download your desired package via

python -m pip install [package-name]

As I wrote elsewhere

Packaging in Python is dire. The root cause is that the language ships without a package manager.

Fortunately, there is one package manager for Python, called Pip. Pip is inspired by Ruby's Gem, but lacks some features. Ironically, Pip itself is complicated to install. Installation on the popular 64-bit Windows demands building and installing two packages from source. This is a big ask for anyone new to programming.

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So the right thing to do is to install pip. However if you can't be bothered, Christoph Gohlke provides binaries for popular Python packages for all Windows platforms http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

In fact, building some Python packages requires a C compiler (eg. mingw32) and library headers for the dependencies. This can be a nightmare on Windows, so remember the name Christoph Gohlke.

I had problems in installing packages on Windows. Found the solution. It works in Windows7+. Mainly anything with Windows Powershell should be able to make it work. This can help you get started with it.

• Firstly, you'll need to add python installation to your PATH variable. This should help.
• You need to download the package in zip format that you are trying to install and unzip it. If it is some odd zip format use 7Zip and it should be extracted.
• Navigate to the directory extracted with setup.py using Windows Powershell (Use link for it if you have problems)
• Run the command python setup.py install

That worked for me when nothing else was making any sense. I use Python 2.7 but the documentation suggests that same would work for Python 3.x also.