How can I install the python module YAML without ROOT ACCESS ( 'easy_install' and 'pip' are not available)?

Question

I am trying to run a python script that calls the yaml module on a server. I only have writing permissions in my home directory. The server has Python 2.7.3 installed. I do not have root access. Also, neither pip nor easy_install are available.

I have downloaded the package and tried to run

python setup.py install --user

which gives the error

error: can't combine user with with prefix/exec_prefix/home or install_(plat)base

How can I get this to work?

Answer 1

Setting up and using a virtualenv is almost always a good option and as you indicated you can download virtualenv.py , but that won't run (anymore) without pip being installed because it tries to install wheels. On Linux Mint with Python 2.7.6 the script eg throws:

OSError: Command /home/ruamel/venv/bin/python -c "import sys, pip; sys...d\\"] + sys.argv[1:]))" setuptools wheel failed with error code 1

You can probably circumvent that by using an older virtualenv.py .

In some other cases it is not feasible to use a virtualenv: eg when the system python has all kinds of libraries pre-installed that you need to use and cannot replicate into a local virtualenv. In that case you can download the latest version of ruamel.yaml (of which I am the author) and which is essentially a superset of the PyYAML functionality. When I forked the code I created a setup.py from scratch and it allows you to do

python setup.py install --user 

without problem on the `setup.py extracted from the tar.gz file downloaded from PyPI.

Answer 2

Based on the idea of the answer by Anton, these steps worked for me

pip install --user ruamel.yaml

then replace in your script

import yaml

with:

from ruamel.yaml import YAML
yaml=YAML(typ='safe')