How do I find the location of my Python site-packages directory?

Question

How do I find the location of my site-packages directory?

Answer 1

I had to do something slightly different for a project I was working on: find the relative site-packages directory relative to the base install prefix. If the site-packages folder was in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages, I wanted the /lib/python2.7/site-packages part. I have, in fact, encountered systems where site-packages was in /usr/lib64, and the accepted answer did NOT work on those systems.

Similar to cheater's answer, my solution peeks deep into the guts of Distutils, to find the path that actually gets passed around inside setup.py. It was such a pain to figure out that I don't want anyone to ever have to figure this out again.

import sys
import os
from distutils.command.install import INSTALL_SCHEMES

if os.name == 'nt':
    scheme_key = 'nt'
else:
    scheme_key = 'unix_prefix'

print(INSTALL_SCHEMES[scheme_key]['purelib'].replace('$py_version_short', (str.split(sys.version))[0][0:3]).replace('$base', ''))

That should print something like /Lib/site-packages or /lib/python3.6/site-packages.