Copied a package to site-packages, but pip doesn't list it. How can I make pip aware of the installed package?

Question

I had to manually build a package and copy it to the site-packages directory. When I type pip list into a console it isn't listed, though I can use it in python scripts. How can I make pip aware of the package?

Installing it via pip is not an option.

Answer 1

You say "Installing it via pip is not an option.", but I'm assuming installing it via pip using a local copy still is. If so, the way to do that is to clone your library into a directory (say /my/lib/dir ), where the root of the source for the root package appears below /my/lib/dir (ex: if the package you want to install is imported as import foo , then you should have /my/lib/dir/foo ). If there is no file named setup.py in your copy of the code, then you need to create a simple one. Something like

# in a file called setup.py above the `foo` directory
from distutils.core import setup

setup(name='foo',
      version='1.0',
      packages=['foo'],
 )

Finally, run pip install . from /my/lib/dir .

It's definitely a hack, but making pip aware of a package without installing it via pip is asking for a hack :-)