ipython install new modules

Question

I am used to the R functionality of installing packages and I am trying to do the same thing with ipython. Sometimes the following method works but then again sometimes it doesn't and I would like to finally find out why it only works half the time.

Normally to install a module (like the requests module for example) I would type the following after opening a fresh terminal:

$ sudo pip install requests
Password: ******* 

This would then be followed by a message indicating that the install was successful or that it has already been installed.

Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): 
requests in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Cleaning up... 

Which suggests that the code can be accessed. And indeed if I run python now from the terminal it shows a good response without any errors whatsoever.

$ python
ActivePython 2.7.2.5 (ActiveState Software Inc.) based on
Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 24 2011, 12:20:15) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import requests
>>> 

I now open PyLab through Alfred and it gives me an error.

Welcome to pylab, a matplotlib-based Python environment [backend: WXAgg].
For more information, type 'help(pylab)'.

In [1]: import requests
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
/Users/vincentwarmerdam/<ipython-input-1-686486c241c8> in <module>()
----> 1 import requests

ImportError: No module named requests

I've read some help from another question on StackOverflow (here) which suggests that I install the module from ipython shell. This gives an even more baffling response:

In [2]: !pip install requests
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): requests in     
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Cleaning up...

In [3]: import requests
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
/Users/vincentwarmerdam/<ipython-input-3-686486c241c8> in <module>()
----> 1 import requests

ImportError: No module named requests

This seems very strange to me. Are there multiple versions of python installed on the system? How could I check this? Do I need to point ipython to the location of the installed code?

Answer 1

Here's what I did that made it work; open up iypthon through the command line and type

import sys
sys.path 

This shows a list of folders where other python modules are located. For me this was:

['',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/bin',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas-0.10.0-py2.7-macosx-10.5-i386.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/googlemaps-1.0.2-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth-1.0.1-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth2-1.5.211-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2-0.7.7-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium-2.28.0-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jellyfish-0.2.0-py2.7-macosx-10.5-i386.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/python_yelp-0.1.1-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pymongo-2.4.2_-py2.7-macosx-10.5-i386.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lucene_querybuilder-0.1.6-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mechanize-0.2.5-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/html2text-3.200.3-py2.7.egg',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python27.zip',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/plat-mac',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
 '/Users/vincentwarmerdam/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL',
 '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages',
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/extensions] 

With this information, I now knew where ipython looks for the modules that one can import. So I downloaded the requests library manually, added it to the same root directory such that the following directory exists:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests 

This folder contains the python modules that belong to requests. The only thing I now had to do was to make sure that ipython knows that this folder exists. Which was done by updating the sys.path.

req_link = '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3/lib/python2.7/requests'
sys.path.append(req_link) 

After this I no longer got the error.

import requests 

Just works.

Also after restarting ipython, I found that ipython automatically updates the new path into the sys.path list.