Python 2.7.9+ and 3.4+
Good news! Python 3.4 (released March 2014) and Python 2.7.9 (released December 2014) ship with Pip. This is the best feature of any Python release. It makes the community's wealth of libraries accessible to everyone. Newbies are no longer excluded from using community libraries by the prohibitive difficulty of setup. In shipping with a package manager, Python joins Ruby, Node.js, Haskell, Perl, Go—almost every other contemporary language with a majority open-source community. Thank you, Python.
If you do find that pip is not available when using Python 3.4+ or Python 2.7.9+, simply execute e.g.:
py -3 -m ensurepip
Of course, that doesn't mean Python packaging is problem solved. The experience remains frustrating. I discuss this in the Stack Overflow question Does Python have a package/module management system?.
And, alas for everyone using Python 2.7.8 or earlier (a sizable portion of the community). There's no plan to ship Pip to you. Manual instructions follow.
Python 2 ≤ 2.7.8 and Python 3 ≤ 3.3
Flying in the face of its 'batteries included' motto, Python ships without a package manager. To make matters worse, Pip was—until recently—ironically difficult to install.
Official instructions
Per https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#do-i-need-to-install-pip:
Download get-pip.py
, being careful to save it as a .py
file rather than .txt
. Then, run it from the command prompt:
python get-pip.py
You possibly need an administrator command prompt to do this. Follow Start a Command Prompt as an Administrator (Microsoft TechNet).
This installs the pip package, which (in Windows) contains ...\Scripts\pip.exe that path must be in PATH environment variable to use pip from the command line (see the second part of 'Alternative Instructions' for adding it to your PATH,
Alternative instructions
The official documentation tells users to install Pip and each of its dependencies from source. That's tedious for the experienced and prohibitively difficult for newbies.
For our sake, Christoph Gohlke prepares Windows installers (.msi
) for popular Python packages. He builds installers for all Python versions, both 32 and 64 bit. You need to:
- Install setuptools
- Install pip
For me, this installed Pip at C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe
. Find pip.exe
on your computer, then add its folder (for example, C:\Python27\Scripts
) to your path (Start / Edit environment variables). Now you should be able to run pip
from the command line. Try installing a package:
pip install httpie
There you go (hopefully)! Solutions for common problems are given below:
Proxy problems
If you work in an office, you might be behind an HTTP proxy. If so, set the environment variables http_proxy
and https_proxy
. Most Python applications (and other free software) respect these. Example syntax:
http://proxy_url:port
http://username:password@proxy_url:port
If you're really unlucky, your proxy might be a Microsoft NTLM proxy. Free software can't cope. The only solution is to install a free software friendly proxy that forwards to the nasty proxy. http://cntlm.sourceforge.net/
Unable to find vcvarsall.bat
Python modules can be partly written in C or C++. Pip tries to compile from source. If you don't have a C/C++ compiler installed and configured, you'll see this cryptic error message.
Error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat
You can fix that by installing a C++ compiler such as MinGW or Visual C++. Microsoft actually ships one specifically for use with Python. Or try Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7.
Often though it's easier to check Christoph's site for your package.
Global libraries
You can run npm list -g
to see which global libraries are installed and where they're located. Use npm list -g | head -1
for truncated output showing just the path. If you want to display only main packages not its sub-packages which installs along with it - you can use - npm list --depth=0
which will show all packages and for getting only globally installed packages, just add -g i.e. npm list -g --depth=0
.
On Unix systems they are normally placed in /usr/local/lib/node
or /usr/local/lib/node_modules
when installed globally. If you set the NODE_PATH
environment variable to this path, the modules can be found by node.
Windows XP - %USERPROFILE%\AppData\npm\node_modules
Windows 7, 8 and 10 - %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules
Non-global libraries
Non-global libraries are installed the node_modules
sub folder in the folder you are currently in.
You can run npm list
to see the installed non-global libraries for your current location.
When installing use -g option to install globally
npm install -g pm2
- pm2 will be installed globally. It will then typically be found in /usr/local/lib/node_modules
(Use npm root -g
to check where.)
npm install pm2
- pm2 will be installed locally. It will then typically be found in the local directory in /node_modules
Best Answer
To install npm on windows just unzip the npm archive where node is. See the docs for more detail.
npm is shipped with node, that is how you should install it. nvm is only for changing node versions and does not install npm. A cleaner way to use npm and nvm is to first install node as it is (with npm), then install the nvm package by
npm install nvm