Re: Pip installs to unexpected place

Please include the group in your response; don't just send it to me.
On 4/14/2025 5:09 AM, Jonathan Gossage wrote:

The virtual environment was owned by the user running pip. It was not owned by root. Does pip not support virtual environments that are owned by a non-root user and have a multi-user secondary group? The actual command was *pip install mypy flake8 sphinx*. The other packages were also installed into the user .local tree and work properly for the user doing the installation, but not for other members of the group that have access to the virtual environment.

Pip doesn't know about the environment it runs in. It seems to me that you didn't active the venv before you installed using pip. So nothing would have gotten installed into the venv. So where is the venv that you set up? I usually put them into ~/venv. For example, a venv named "gf4" is at ~/venv/gf4.
To activate a venv, you have to source its activate script, which is in the venv. First you have to mark it as executable.  Then you source it -
source ~/venv/gf4/bin/activate
Now when you run python (or more likely, python3), it will find the venv's directories before it will find the system's or user's. You know the activation has been successful because the prompt changes to show you.  The activation applies to the terminal session in which you activated the venv.

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 10:11 PM Thomas Passin <list1@tompassin.net <mailto:list1@tompassin.net>> wrote:
     On 4/13/2025 7:10 PM, Jonathan Gossage via Python-list wrote:
     > I am using *Python 3.13* in a virtual environment under *Ubuntu
    Linux 24.04*
     > .
     > The version of Python was compiled from source code and installed
    with make
     > altinstall. I attempted to use *pip* to install the *Sphinx*
    package into
     > the virtual environment using the command *pip install sphinx* in the
     > virtual environment*.* I expected that *sphinx* would be
    installed in the
     > *site-packages* directory in the virtual environment. Instead, it was
     > installed into the site-packages directory in
     > */home/jonathan/.locals/lib/python3.13/site-packages* even though
    I did not
     > specify *--user* to the *pip install* command. Is this expected
    behavior? I
     > wanted Sphinx to be installed in the virtual environment so that
    it would
     > be accessible to all users of the virtual environment.
     If you ran the command as a user, then pip would not have root
    privileges and could not install into the system directory. It would
    fall back to installing into the user's tree. It usually prints a
    message to that effect. That's standard behavior if you don't have the
    venv activated.
     If you want to install something into a virtual environment, you
    have to
    activate the environment before installing the something.
     A complication could occur if the system's Python version is the
    same as
    the one you built. You might inadvertently run the system's binary of
    python 3.13 instead of your own. I'm not familiar with the make
    altinstall command but I doubt that it changes the ordinary rules for
    invoking python and using a venv.
   -- Jonathan Gossage