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

As others have noted, distutils.sysconfig has the relevant settings:

import distutils.sysconfig
print distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib()

...though the default site.py does something a bit more crude, paraphrased below:

import sys, os
print os.sep.join([sys.prefix, 'lib', 'python' + sys.version[:3], 'site-packages'])

(it also adds ${sys.prefix}/lib/site-python and adds both paths for sys.exec_prefix as well, should that constant be different).

That said, what's the context? You shouldn't be messing with your site-packages directly; setuptools/distutils will work for installation, and your program may be running in a virtualenv where your pythonpath is completely user-local, so it shouldn't assume use of the system site-packages directly either.

Answer 2

For Ubuntu,

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

...is not correct.

It will point you to /usr/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

This folder only contains packages your operating system has automatically installed for programs to run.

On ubuntu, the site-packages folder that contains packages installed via setup_tools\easy_install\pip will be in /usr/local/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

The second folder is probably the more useful one if the use case is related to installation or reading source code.

If you do not use Ubuntu, you are probably safe copy-pasting the first code box into the terminal.

Answer 3

This works for me. It will get you both dist-packages and site-packages folders. If the folder is not on Python's path, it won't be doing you much good anyway.

import sys; 
print [f for f in sys.path if f.endswith('packages')]

Output (Ubuntu installation):

['/home/username/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages']

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

For those who are using poetry, you can find your virtual environment path with poetry debug:

$ poetry debug

Poetry
Version: 1.1.4
Python:  3.8.2

Virtualenv
Python:         3.8.2
Implementation: CPython
Path:           /Users/cglacet/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/envs/my-virtualenv
Valid:          True

System
Platform: darwin
OS:       posix
Python:   /Users/cglacet/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2

Using this information you can list site packages:

ls /Users/cglacet/.pyenv/versions/3.8.2/envs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/

Answer 6

A side-note: The proposed solution (distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib()) does not work when there is more than one site-packages directory (as recommended by this article). It will only return the main site-packages directory.

Alas, I have no better solution either. Python doesn't seem to keep track of site-packages directories, just the packages within them.