How can I install the Beautiful Soup module on the Mac?

I read this without finding the solution: http://docs.python.org/install/index.html


The "normal" way is to:

  • Go to the Beautiful Soup web site, http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
  • Download the package
  • Unpack it
  • In a Terminal window, cd to the resulting directory
  • Type python setup.py install

Another solution is to use easy_install. Go to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall), install the package using the instructions on that page, and then type, in a Terminal window:

easy_install BeautifulSoup4
# for older v3:
# easy_install BeautifulSoup

easy_install will take care of downloading, unpacking, building, and installing the package. The advantage to using easy_install is that it knows how to search for many different Python packages, because it queries the PyPI registry. Thus, once you have easy_install on your machine, you install many, many different third-party packages simply by one command at a shell.


I think the current right way to do this is by pip like Pramod comments

pip install beautifulsoup4

because of last changes in Python, see discussion here. This was not so in the past.


Brian beat me too it, but since I already have the transcript:

easy_install

aaron@ares ~$ sudo easy_install BeautifulSoup
Searching for BeautifulSoup
Best match: BeautifulSoup 3.0.7a
Processing BeautifulSoup-3.0.7a-py2.5.egg
BeautifulSoup 3.0.7a is already the active version in easy-install.pth

Using /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/BeautifulSoup-3.0.7a-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for BeautifulSoup
Finished processing dependencies for BeautifulSoup

.. or the normal boring way:

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ curl http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/download/BeautifulSoup.tar.gz > bs.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 71460  100 71460    0     0  84034      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  111k

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ tar -xzvf bs.tar.gz 
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.py.3.diff
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.py.3.diff
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/CHANGELOG
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/README
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/setup.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/testall.sh
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/to3.sh
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/PKG-INFO
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.pyc
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.pyc

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ cd BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/

aaron@ares ~/Downloads/BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1$ sudo python setup.py install
running install
<... snip ...>

Download the package and unpack it. In Terminal, go to the package's directory and type

python setup.py install