Action

This document will give you a quick overview of installing custom packages into python. There are two primary ways to do so, one is with pip install --user and the other is virtualenv; both have advantages and disadvantages.

Instructions

Using virtualenv

Here are the examples using virtualenv, the benefit here is that in a shared space many users could collaborate on one custom instances of packages for their group if the venv is created inside a lab share.

Python 2.7

Here we see that numpy is not installed.

...

ew2193@headnode7.rit.albany.edu:~/python_project                2.08 1.66 1.00 3/201 5951
1036 > deactivate

ew2193@headnode7.rit.albany.edu:~/python_project                2.08 1.66 1.00 3/201 5951
1037 > python
Python 2.7.5 (default, Nov 21 2015, 00:39:04)
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import numpy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named numpy
>>> 

Python 3

Here is the same set of commands using python3 rather than python2. You will notice only slight changes from the python2 version.

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