Manually installing modules with python3.9

Question

My usual workflow for manually installing python modules doesn't work since I upgraded to python3.9 on my mac. Suppose I want to install a custom module called "myfiles" from the setup script, I do

cd myfiles
python3 setup.py install --user

The output contains the line

Extracting myfiles-1.6.1-py3.9.egg to /Users/antonius/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages

When I inspect the content of sys.path , I see the directory

/Users/antonius/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages

as well as all other directories under it. However, the directory

/Users/antonius/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages

does not appear in the list of paths. Even if I edit my ~/.zshrc to include the line

export PYTHONPATH="/Users/antonius/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH"

then the list of paths contains this directory, but does not contain any of the directories under it, so I cannot import my module.

What is going on? How do I tell python to expand the list of paths from the content of the site-packages/ directory? Even then, it doesn't seem right that I need to add that path in my ~/.zshrc .

Btw, the content of my ~/.pydistutils.cfg file is just

[install]
prefix=

Answer 1

Use pip . pip install --user. will do the same thing. setup.py is deprecated.