pypa/pip — Issue #446: Allow pip to install libraries in a directory.
Author: skorokithakis
Created: 2012-02-02 18:16:25+00:00
State: open

Some environments, like AppEngine, require packages to be in a specific directory. Right now, I haven't found a way to automatically download and install these. It would be fantastic if pip could download the packages and extract them into a directory specified by the user, similar to --no-install or -d, except it wouldn't just download tarballs or place them in the "build" directory, it would place them in a directory the user specified.

This could be as easy as making -d extract the tarballs or --no-install move them to a directory.

For example:

> $ pip download shortuuid
>
> Downloading/unpacking shortuuid
> Downloading shortuuid-0.1.tar.gz
> Running setup.py egg_info for package shortuuid
>
> Successfully downloaded shortuuid
>
> $ ls shortuuid
> __init__.py

This is different from --no-install, which extracts the package in "build/" ("download" would place the *module* at the directory, not the entire contents of the package, the setup.py files, etc), and different from -d, which just downloads the package.