Installing a python package/tool by a non root user

Question

(1) I have to install one python package (HTSeq) but i dont have root privileges.

The package need python 2.4 or latest version. We have python 2.3 on our cluster.

Answer 1

Setuptools is another requirement which you need to install that package.

One option is to use virtualenv to create a contained python environment. This can be made everywhere and is owned by the user who creates it.

To install virtualenv without admin rights (from this answer):

Download tar.gz of the latest version of virtualenv. Unpack it. You don't even need to install it, just run virtualenv.py, for example:

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.7.1.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf virtualenv-1.7.1.2.tar.gz
/home/amit/tools/localpython/bin/python2.7 virtualenv-1.7.1.2/virtualenv.py env

env/bin/pip install HTSeq
env/bin/pip install numpy

Now run your script using the python binary in the virtual environment:

env/bin/python myscript.py