Installing pip packages to $HOME folder

While you can use a virtualenv, you don't need to. The trick is passing the PEP370 --user argument to the setup.py script. With the latest version of pip, one way to do it is:

pip install --user mercurial

This should result in the hg script being installed in $HOME/.local/bin/hg and the rest of the hg package in $HOME/.local/lib/pythonx.y/site-packages/.

Note, that the above is true for Python 2.6. There has been a bit of controversy among the Python core developers about what is the appropriate directory location on Mac OS X for PEP370-style user installations. In Python 2.7 and 3.2, the location on Mac OS X was changed from $HOME/.local to $HOME/Library/Python. This might change in a future release. But, for now, on 2.7 (and 3.2, if hg were supported on Python 3), the above locations will be $HOME/Library/Python/x.y/bin/hg and $HOME/Library/Python/x.y/lib/python/site-packages.

I would use virtualenv at your HOME directory.

$ sudo easy_install -U virtualenv
$ cd ~
$ virtualenv .
$ bin/pip ...

You could then also alter ~/.(login|profile|bash_profile), whichever is right for your shell to add ~/bin to your PATH and then that pip|python|easy_install would be the one used by default.

You can specify the -t option (--target) to specify the destination directory. See pip install --help for detailed information. This is the command you need:

pip install -t path_to_your_home package-name

for example, for installing say mxnet, in my $HOME directory, I type:

pip install -t /home/foivos/ mxnet