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site-packages is the target directory of manually built Python packages. When you build and install Python packages from source (using distutils, probably by executing python setup.py install ), you will find the installed modules in site-packages by default.
there is a site package directory in a virtualenv. You can get the directory for site-specific modules inside/outside virtualenv using python -c "from distutils. sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())" (it works on both Python 2 and 3 too). This should be in any basic tutorial on using python.
dist-packages is a Debian-specific convention that is also present in its derivatives, like Ubuntu. Modules are installed to dist-packages when they come from the Debian package manager into this location:
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Since easy_install and pip are installed from the package manager, they also use dist-packages, but they put packages here:
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
From the Debian Python Wiki:
dist-packages instead of site-packages. Third party Python software installed from Debian packages goes into dist-packages, not site-packages. This is to reduce conflict between the system Python, and any from-source Python build you might install manually.
This means that if you manually install Python from source, it uses the site-packages directory. This allows you to keep the two installations separate, especially since Debian and Ubuntu rely on the system version of Python for many system utilities.
dist-packages is the debian-specific directory where apt and friends install their stuff, and site-packages is the standard pip directory.
The problem is -- what happens when different versions of the same package are present in different directories?
My solution to the problem is to make dist-packages a symlink to site-packages:
for d in $(find $WORKON_HOME -type d -name dist-packages); do
pushd $d
cd ..
if test -d dist-packages/__pycache__; then
mv -v dist-packages/__pycache__/* site-packages/__pycache__/
rmdir -v dist-packages/__pycache__
fi
mv -v dist-packages/* site-packages/
rmdir -v dist-packages
ln -sv site-packages dist-packages
popd
done
(if you are not using gnu tools, remove the -v option).
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