How to change default install location for pip

Question

I'm trying to install Pandas using pip, but I'm having a bit of trouble. I just ran sudo pip install pandas which successfully downloaded pandas. However, it did not get downloaded to the location that I wanted. Here's what I see when I use pip show pandas:

--- Name: pandas Version: 0.14.0 Location: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pandas-0.14.0-py2.7-macosx-10.9-intel.egg Requires: python-dateutil, pytz, numpy 

So it is installed. But I was confused when I created a new Python Project and searched under System Libs/lib/python for pandas, because it didn't show up. Some of the other packages that I've downloaded in the past did show up, however, so I tried to take a look at where those were. Running pip show numpy (which I can import with no problem) yielded:

--- Name: numpy Version: 1.6.2 Location: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python Requires:  

Which is in a completely different directory. For the sake of confirming my error, I ran pip install pyquery to see where it would be downloaded to, and got:

Name: pyquery Version: 1.2.8 Location: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages Requires: lxml, cssselect 

So the same place as pandas...

How do I change the default download location for pip so that these packages are downloaded to the same location that numpy is in?

Note: There were a few similar questions that I saw when searching for a solution, but I didn't see anything that mentioned permanently changing the default location.

Answer 1

According to pip documentation at

http://pip.readthedocs.org/en/stable/user_guide/#configuration

You will need to specify the default install location within a pip.ini file, which, also according to the website above is usually located as follows

On Unix and Mac OS X the configuration file is: $HOME/.pip/pip.conf

On Windows, the configuration file is: %HOME%\pip\pip.ini

The %HOME% is located in C:\Users\Bob on windows assuming your name is Bob

On linux the $HOME directory can be located by using cd ~

You may have to create the pip.ini file when you find your pip directory. Within your pip.ini or pip.config you will then need to put (assuming your on windows) something like

[global] target=C:\Users\Bob\Desktop 

Except that you would replace C:\Users\Bob\Desktop with whatever path you desire. If you are on Linux you would replace it with something like /usr/local/your/path

After saving the command would then be

pip install pandas 

However, the program you install might assume it will be installed in a certain directory and might not work as a result of being installed elsewhere.