Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Isolating the runtime environment

pip may be used to install system-wide packages. On UNIX-based and Linux systems, this will require superuser privileges, so the actual invocation will be as follows:

sudo pip install <package-name>

Note that this is not required on Windows since it does not provide the Python interpreter by default, and Python on Windows is usually installed manually by the user without superuser privileges.

Installing system-wide packages directly from PyPI is not recommended, and should be avoided. This may seem like a contradiction to the previous statement that using pip is a PyPA recommendation, but there are some serious reasons for that. As we explained earlier, Python is often an important part of many packages that ...