Eggs in path before PYTHONPATH environment variable

Question

If I have packages installed from easy_install, the eggs are prepended to sys.path before the items in the PYTHONPATH variable.

Fo

Answer 1

I have done something like the following to prepend to the system path when running a top-level python executable file:

import sys
sys.path = ["<your python path>"] + sys.path

Often, the "<your python path>" for me involves use of the __file__ attribute to do relative look up for a path that includes the top-level module for my project. This is not recommended for use in producing, eggs, though I don't seem to mind the consequences. There may be another alternative to __file__.

Answer 2

Unfortunately this is done with a hard-coded template deep inside setuptools/command/easy_install.py. You could create a patched setuptools with an edited template, but I've found no clean way to extend easy_install from the outside.

Each time easy_install runs it will regenerate the file easy_install.pth. Here is a quick script which you can run after easy_install, to remove the header and footer from easy_install.pth. You could create a wrapper shell script to run this immediately after easy_install:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
path = sys.argv[1]
lines = open(path, 'rb').readlines()
if lines and 'import sys' in lines[0]:
    open(path, 'wb').write(''.join(lines[1:-1]) + '\n')

Example:

% easy_install gdata
% PYTHONPATH=xyz python -c 'import sys; print sys.path[:2]'
['', '/Users/pat/virt/lib/python2.6/site-packages/gdata-2.0.14-py2.6.egg']

% ./fix_path ~/virt/lib/python2.6/site-packages/easy_install.pth
% PYTHONPATH=xyz python -c 'import sys; print sys.path[:2]'
['', '/Users/pat/xyz']

For more clarification, here is the format of easy-install.pth:

import sys; sys.__plen = len(sys.path)
./gdata-2.0.14-py2.6.egg
import sys; new=sys.path[sys.__plen:]; del sys.path[sys.__plen:]; p=getattr(sys,'__egginsert',0); sys.path[p:p]=new; sys.__egginsert = p+len(new)

The two import sys lines are the culprit causing the eggs to appear at the start of the path. My script just removes those sys.path-munging lines.

Answer 3

Consider using the -S command-line option to suppress *.pth processing:

python -c 'import sys; print("\n".join(sys.path))'
python -S -c 'import sys; print("\n".join(sys.path))'

https://docs.python.org/3/library/site.html#site.main

You can also use -S with site.main() to delay *.pth processing until runtime, say to capture the original sys.path for appending:

export PYTHONPATH=$(
  PYTHONPATH='' \
  python -c 'import sys; \
    sys.path.extend(sys.argv[1:]); old=list(sys.path); \
    import site; site.main(); \
    [ old.append(p) for p in sys.path if p not in old ]; \
    sys.path=old; \
    print ":".join(sys.path)' \
  $EXTRA_PATH $ANOTHER_PATH)

python -S ... # using explicit PYTHONPATH

• Start from explicit empty PYTHONPATH
• Append to sys.path explicitly with extend
• Import site and call site.main()
• Append new paths to old path and then install it in sys.path
• Print with ":" for PYTHONPATH
• python -S is desirable for later runs only using $PYTHONPATH
• python -S may or may not be desirable while setting PYTHONPATH (depending on if you need sys.path expanded before extending)