When I use sudo pip to install software I get the message "the directory... is not owned by the current user"

Question

The directory '/home/bijay/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.

But software get installed. I just want to know what the heck above error means.

For example:-

Solution

When you run sudo your environment is passed along while the effective user switches to root. Your environment includes that your ~/ or home directory (the value of the environment variable HOME) is /home/bijay.

pip looks for an http cache before downloading packages. Probably for a combination of security, sanity and privacy reasons pip disables the cache so as not to write to a cache directory not owned by the current user. It's just telling you that it did that.

As it hints, using sudo -H would set the HOME environment variable before executing the command passed to sudo, using root's home directory /root as $HOME instead of your user's. The cache could then be written in /root/.cache/pip/http with no errors.

As a sidenote, you probably shouldn't be running pip as root anyway.

Comments

[Admin]

The error means exactly what it says.

[Bijay uprety]

Thanks. It pretty much explains. But why running pip as root is not good. Isn't pip just a package manager to install python software/libraries ?

[Zanna]

@Bijayuprety see askubuntu.com/questions/802544/…

[jdwolf]

Generally speaking if you want system-wide python packages use your distributions packages instead.

[cowlinator]

If you want to install without using root or sudo, simply use the --no-cache-dir argument. The only downside is that it may take a little longer and might use slightly more of your network bandwidth.

[jdwolf]

@cowlinator Or you could just ignore the warning because its already disabling the cache. However the warning also tells you what you need to do. If pip didn't need root then it'd use the users cache without disabling it.

[guntbert]

Why would that help?