We’ll be using virtualenv so our installation experiments are contained and don’t modify your system Python environment. If you aren’t already familiar with virtualenv, you may want to read up on it first.
Create a virtualenv:
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages pip_test_env
We use the --no-site-packages flag to prevent this virtualenv from “seeing” your global Python “site-packages” directory, so that our experiments aren’t confused by any Python packages you happen to already have installed globally.
Recent versions of virtualenv (1.4+) automatically install pip for you inside the virtualenv (there will already be a pip script in pip_test_env/bin/). If you are using a pre-1.4 virtualenv, run pip_test_env/bin/easy_install pip to install pip in the virtual environment.
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If you are using Windows, executable scripts in the virtualenv will be located at pip_test_env\Scripts\ rather than pip_test_env/bin/. Just replace all occurrences of the latter with the former.
Let’s “activate” the virtualenv to put pip_test_env/bin on our default PATH, so we can just type pip instead of pip_test_env/bin/pip:
$ . pip_test_env/bin/activate
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The leading dot is important. Without it, a subshell is spawned and only that subshell gets the virtualenv activated. The leading dot tells the shell to run the activate script in the current shell.
On Windows, this is:
$ pip_test_env\Scripts\activate.bat
In either case, your shell prompt should now begin with (pip_test_env) to remind you that a virtualenv is activated. When you are done working with this virtualenv type deactivate to remove its bin directory from your PATH.