Installing nosetests - permission denied

Question

Trying to install nosetests as per the learnpythonthehardway tutorial, I'm having problems. Any clues on what I should try next?

$ easy_install nose
Searching for nose
Best match: nose 1.1.2
Processing nose-1.1.2-py2.6.egg
nose 1.1.2 is already the active version in easy-install.pth
Installing nosetests-2.6 script to /usr/local/bin
error: /usr/local/bin/nosetests-2.6: Permission denied`

One question about installing that I have: if I have something saved in a random location on my computer, can it be imported into a python script regardless of where it is? So if I execute runthis.py that's in a folder called "projects", and I have from setup tools import setup as the first line of the program, does setup tools have to be anywhere in particular (such as the "projects" folder) for python to find it?

Answer 1

Are you able to use sudo ?

If so, simply use sudo easy_install nose to install as root.

If not, you'll need to install somewhere you can write to, not the default location which you don't have permission to modify. This can be done easily in the traditional way, or using virtualenv which can a bit trickier to get set up initially.

As for the second question, no, python will only find things that are in directories found in sys.path , which is set to the contents of the PYTHONPATH environment variable plus the installed python's own library directories by default.

Answer 2

It is often (highly!) advisable to set up your own "local" repository of packages, for whatever language system (be it Python or otherwise) that you are using. Leave the "system installed" packages, whatever they might be, completely alone ... in case some uber-important system tool (the package-manager, anyone?) might also be using them and might be dependent on them.

The means of doing this vary from language to language, but they'll be documented somewhere all the same. You might even find that the "distro" that you're using has already anticipated this requirement and has set-aside some agreed upon location, eg "/usr/local/..." just for your own personal use.