Install Tkinter in virtualenv on Linux without Sudo access

Question

I am using a virtualenv on a Linux machine. I don' have sudo access so I can use pip only.

I tried:

 pip install python-tk

But this resulted in this error message

Collecting python-tk
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement python-tk (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for python-tk

How can I install Tkinter in virtualenv on Linux?

Answer 1

You can't install tkinter using pip because tkinter is an interface to a C++ library called Tk, whereas pip is coded with Python.

Luckily you do not have to worry about the above statement because tkinter comes as a built-in library for the standard Python distribution.

So what you have to do is:

1. Go to your virtualenv directory: cd to_your_virtualenv_directory
2. Activate it: source bin/activate
3. Access your python shell within it: python
4. Then import tkinter as tk

Note:

Depending on your settings, maybe when you type python you will notice you are prompted to work with Python 2.x instead. In that case, just type this: import Tkinter as Tk. If, however, typing python leads you to use Python 3.x (as I set it on my machine), but you prefer to work with Python 2.x then simply type python2 instead of python.