pip install: Please check the permissions and owner of that directory

While installing pip and python I have ran into a that says:

The directory '/Users/Parthenon/Library/Logs/pi' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the debug log has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want the -H flag.

because I now have to install using sudo.

I had python and a handful of libraries already installed on my Mac, I'm running Yosemite. I recently had to do a clean wipe and then reinstall of the OS. Now I'm getting this prompt and I'm having trouble figuring out how to change it

Before my command line was Parthenon$ now it's Philips-MBP:~ Parthenon$

I am the sole owner of this computer and this is the only account on it. This seems to be a problem when upgrading to python 3.4, nothing seems to be in the right place, virtualenv isn't going where I expect it to, etc.

I also saw this change on my Mac when I went from running pip to sudo pip. Adding -H to sudo causes the message to go away for me. E.g.

sudo -H pip install foo

man sudo tells me that -H causes sudo to set $HOME to the target users (root in this case).

So it appears pip is looking into $HOME/Library/Log and sudo by default isn't setting $HOME to /root/. Not surprisingly ~/Library/Log is owned by you as a user rather than root.

I suspect this is some recent change in pip. I'll run it with sudo -H for now to work around.

What is the problem here is that you somehow installed into virtualenv using sudo. Probably by accident. This means root user will rewrite Python package data, making all file owned by root and your normal user cannot write those files anymore. Usually virtualenv should be used and owned by your normal UNIX user only.

You can fix the issue by changing UNIX file permissions pack to your user. Try:

$ sudo chown -R USERNAME /Users/USERNAME/Library/Logs/pip
$ sudo chown -R USERNAME /Users/USERNAME/Library/Caches/pip

then pip should be able to write those files again.

More information about UNIX file permission management