pip¶

pip already comes with your Python installation from your distribution’s package manager. However, when installing packages, it’s generally not a good idea to install them globally. Furthermore, Python has a myriad of ways of installing packages, which is confusing and could easily screw up your system.

As a rule of thumb, avoid sudo pip. Always append --user to the install command and double check which pip you are using with pip --version. It should say the version number as well as the directory it’s being pulled from.

Finally, there’s a separate pip for Python 2 and 3. You could easily have 4-5 different versions (2 installed globally, 2 installed locally, and pip-installed pips) which compounds the issue further.

Due to the recursive nature of installing pip with pip and the fact that you can orphan packages, you DO NOT want to do this:

pip install --user pip

It’s tempting to do this so you can keep a newer version of pip without upgrading your system pip (and potentially messing it up.) However, upon upgrading from Fedora 23 to 24, Python upgraded from 3.4 to 3.5. The pip I installed in ~/.local now pointed to 3.5, even if you specify the path manually, and so my 3.4 packages were “orphaned”. For more information, see Pip3 from Python3 upgrade will break Pip from Python.

I ended up just wiping my local pip’s and doing a user install with my system pip.