Pydistutil Configuration

Something I rather hate is mixing up my development environment with my ordinary system environment. I like having things I installed by myself separated from system stuff (and I'm not the only one... think about the convention of /usr/local).

My development machine are essentially single user machines. I am the only user. Thus, global installations are simply an overkill. And I hate pervasive package management systems. For the MacOS, for example, I chose brew. I love it. It does the minimum to automate tedious stuff, but it leaves me complete freedom.

Of course, since I want my package manager to do the minimum necessary stuff, I don't want it to touch my python modules.

Don't touch my Python!

 Well... anyway. As a consequence I heavily rely on python own module manager, that is to say pip/easy_install. You can tell distutils the default base install directory. For example, on Linux, I have in my home directory this .pydistutil.cfg file:

% cat .pydistutils.cfg  
[install]
prefix = ~/.local
install_scripts = ~/bin
install_lib = ~/.local/lib/python$py_version_short/site-packages

which basically makes all the installation in my home-directory.
More information here and here. I use this for modules I plan to use in multiple projects.
Otherwise, virtualenv.