Learn how to pip install Python packages without root access.

Introduction

High performance computer (HPC) clusters are shared resources. As such, sudo/root access is denied to prevent one user from potentially harming the system or deleting data. This does make installing Linux dependencies and/or Python libraries. So how do we get around this?

Finding the default Python

When installing Python packages, it is important to know the default Python version. To find your default version, run the following command:

which python3

Which should produce an output like this:

You can check for other Python version by running:

ls -ls /usr/bin/python*

Installing Python libraries

To install packages without sudo/root access, run the following command, making sure to insert your package name:

/usr/bin/python3 -m pip install <insert package name here> --user

For example, if we wanted to install the awesome giotto-tda package, we would run:

/usr/bin/python3 -m pip install giotto-tda --user

So why does this work? Well notice the --user flag, this ensures that the package is only installed within your own user environment. This allows you to download packages without sudo/root access on HPC systems and servers. Give it a try!