Confirmation when installing with pip globally

Question

Sometimes when working with Python projects one can forget to activate a virtual environment.

Is there a way to get an explicit confirmation when installing Python modules with pip to the global scope instead of a virtual environment?

Installing in the global scope shouldn't work unless you ran `pip` with `sudo`, which you shouldn't do if you're trying to work in a virtualenv. — jwodder, May 16 '16 at 17:46
@jwodder If you install Python through Mac OS X's Homebrew, everything is installed to `/usr/local/` and you could `pip install` "globally" without sudo. — kennytm, May 16 '16 at 18:36

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

You can try to wrap pip install, e.g.:

import pip

def install(package):
    pip.main(['install', package])

# Example
if __name__ == '__main__':
    if not hasattr(sys, 'real_prefix'):
        # replace this with your confirmation callback
        print('Warning! installing in global scope!')
    install('argh')

Sources:

Installing python module within code

Python: Determine if running inside virtualenv

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 27 '23 at 07:01

You could use:

$ pip config set install.require-virtualenv true

but this results in a rather inconvenient error when trying to install without a virtual environment:

ERROR: Could not find an activated virtualenv (required).

I have opened a PR implementing a more user-friendly option (at least in my opinion) to enable a warning instead of an error that also has a prompt to ask whether you'd like to continue or not. If that gets merged then you'll be able to do the following:

$ pip config set install.global-install-warning true
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
WARNING: Could not find an activated virtualenv.
Proceed (y/N)?

Confirmation when installing with pip globally

2 Answers2