pip is not able to install packages correctly: Permission denied error [duplicate] pip is not able to install packages correctly: Permission denied error [duplicate] python python

pip is not able to install packages correctly: Permission denied error [duplicate]


It looks like you're having a permissions error, based on this message in your output: error: could not create '/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lxml': Permission denied.

One thing you can try is doing a user install of the package with pip install lxml --user. For more information on how that works, check out this StackOverflow answer. (Thanks to Ishaan Taylor for the suggestion)

You can also run pip install as a superuser with sudo pip install lxml but it is not generally a good idea because it can cause issues with your system-level packages.


Set up a virtualenv:

% curl -kLso /tmp/get-pip.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py % sudo python /tmp/get-pip.py

These commands install pip into the global site-packages directory.

% sudo pip install virtualenv

and ditto for virtualenv:

% mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs

I like my virtualenvs under one tree in my home directory called .virtualenvs

% virtualenv ~/.virtualenvs/lxmltest

Creates a virtualenv.

% . ~/.virtualenvs/lxmltest/bin/activate

Removes the need to specify the full path to pip/python in this virtualenv.

% pip install lxml

Alternatively execute ~/.virtualenvs/lxmltest/bin/pip install lxml if you chose not to follow the previous step. Note, I'm not sure how far along you are, so some of these steps can be safely skipped. Of course, if you mess something up, you can always rm -Rf ~/.virtualenvs/lxmltest and start again from a new virtualenv.


On a Mac, you need to use this command:

STATIC_DEPS=true sudo pip install lxml