Can pip install packages for all users (on a Linux system)?
Wolfgang Maier
wolfgang.maier at biologie.uni-freiburg.de
Tue Jul 24 15:36:52 EDT 2018
On 24.07.2018 20:07, John Ladasky wrote:
> I've been using "sudo pip3 install" to add packages from the PyPI repository. I have multiple user accounts on the computer in question. My goal is to install packages that are accessible to all user accounts. I know that using the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu will install for all users, but not every Python package is included in the Canonical repository.
>
> I hadn't noticed any discrepancies until recently. I upgraded from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04. In parallel, I upgraded tensorflow-gpu 1.4.0 to 1.8.0. Everything worked on my main account. However, attempting to import tensorflow from Python on a secondary account failed. Eventually I checked the pip lists in each account, and I found a reference to the old tensorflow 1.4 on the secondary account. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling tensorflow-gpu 1.8 on the secondary account fixed the problem.
>
One possible explanation for your finding: user installs normally take
precedence over system-wide installs both at import time and for pip
(list, uninstall, etc.). So if you, or your users, have installed
tensorflow 1.4.0 using pip install --user before, then a system-wide pip
install tensorflow 1.8.0 won't override this previous version (though if
your admin account has the user install, too, pip would warn you).
Otherwise, a pip install without --user is effectively a system-wide
install as long as your Python is a system-wide install.
> I believe that I now have tensorflow 1.8 installed twice on my system, once for each user. If anyone can share how to convince pip to behave like Synaptic, I would appreciate it. Thanks.
>
If a user has a user install of tensorflow, it will always shadow the
system-wide version. The only solution I know (except manipulating
Python's import path list) is to pip uninstall the per-user version.
Best,
Wolfgang
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