Setting the default installation location for pip

Question

I'm working on a computer with extremely limited internal storage, so I want to set up pip and my Python environment so that new packages are installed to an SD card (which is going to be inside the machine all the time anyway) by default.

Does pip provide this kind of functionality?

Solution

A somewhat alternative approach could be virtualenv, like this:

virtualenv path/to/your/storage/venv

then

source path/to/your/storage/venv/bin/activate

This last command transports you to your virtual environment, and while in there, anything installed via pip will get installed in that directory, which can be on other device.
I would prefer this approach, because there's very little manual configuring required, but you would need to install virtualenv (it's about 2MB).

Comments

[magicandre1981]

which OS do you use?

[Jules]

@magicandre1981 This is on Ubuntu 15.10.