How to install python modules in a local directory? --user and exporting pythonpath isn't working

Question

I don't know very much about python but would like to install some python modules in a local directory on a server on which I don't have sudo access.

I start by going into my desired directory (not root) and create the directory tree needed to store my custom modules

cd /root/example/sub-example
mkdir -p local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

I then export this local path to PYTHONPATH

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/root/example/sub-example/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

I then make a new sub-directory to store the python package while extracting

mkdir example-python-directory
cd example-python-directory
wget http://example-python-package
tar -xvf example-python-package.tar.gz
cd example-python-package

Last, I run the setup.py script with the --user flag to try to get it to install in my specified /local directory

python setup.py install --user

The problem is, nothing is installed in my /root/example/sub-example/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages directory, and instead I find that I now have a new directory at root: /root/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

Is there a way to prevent this? I feel like my lack of Python knowledge is causing me to make some silly error that is probably obvious to others. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

create a folder called "lib"

For Python 3

pip3 install <your_python_module_name> -t lib/

For Python 2

pip install <your_python_module_name> -t lib/

Answer 2

CFLAGS=-I$(brew --prefix)/include LDFLAGS=-L$(brew --prefix)/lib pip install <package>

I found that on servers where you haven't root access to, you can usually install the python module into your .brew/lib using this.