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The --user flag to pip install tells Pip to install packages in some specific directories within your home directory. This is a good way to have your own default Python environment that adds to the packages within your system directories, and therefore, does not affect the system Python installation.
The pip install <package> command always looks for the latest version of the package and installs it. It also searches for dependencies listed in the package metadata and installs them to ensure that the package has all the requirements that it needs.
By default, the “pip install” command is used to install a package for all users. This means the package will be installed into the system directory like “/usr/local/lib/python3. 8” in Linux systems. In order to write this directory, the installation requires root privileges.
pip defaults to installing Python packages to a system directory (such as /usr/local/lib/python3.4). This requires root access.
--user makes pip install packages in your home directory instead, which doesn't require any special privileges.
--user installs in site.USER_SITE.
For my case, it was /Users/.../Library/Python/2.7/bin. So I have added that to my PATH (in ~/.bash_profile file):
export PATH=$PATH:/Users/.../Library/Python/2.7/bin
Other answers mention site.USER_SITE as where Python packages get placed. If you're looking for binaries, these go in {site.USER_BASE}/bin.
If you want to add this directory to your shell's search path, use:
export PATH="${PATH}:$(python3 -c 'import site; print(site.USER_BASE)')/bin"
Just a warning:
According to this issue, --user is currently not valid inside a virtual env's pip, since a user location doesn't really make sense for a virtual environment.
So do not use pip install --user some_pkg inside a virtual environment, otherwise, virtual environment's pip will be confused. See this answer for more details.
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