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28.14. site — Site-specific configuration hook
Source code: Lib/site.py
This module is automatically imported during initialization. The automatic import can be suppressed using the interpreter’s -S
option.
Importing this module will append site-specific paths to the module search path and add a few builtins.
It starts by constructing up to four directories from a head and a tail part. For the head part, it uses sys.prefix
and sys.exec_prefix
; empty heads are skipped. For the tail part, it uses the empty string and then lib/site-packages
(on Windows) or lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages
and then lib/site-python
(on Unix and Macintosh). For each of the distinct head-tail combinations, it sees if it refers to an existing directory, and if so, adds it to sys.path
and also inspects the newly added path for configuration files.
A path configuration file is a file whose name has the form name.pth
and exists in one of the four directories mentioned above; its contents are additional items (one per line) to be added to sys.path
. Non-existing items are never added to sys.path
, and no check is made that the item refers to a directory rather than a file. No item is added to sys.path
more than once. Blank lines and lines beginning with #
are skipped. Lines starting with import
(followed by space or tab) are executed.
Changed in version 2.6: A space or tab is now required after the import keyword.
For example, suppose sys.prefix
and sys.exec_prefix
are set to /usr/local
. The Python X.Y library is then installed in /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y
. Suppose this has a subdirectory /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages
with three subsubdirectories, foo
, bar
and spam
, and two path configuration files, foo.pth
and bar.pth
. Assume foo.pth
contains the following:
# foo package configuration
foo
bar
bletch
and bar.pth
contains:
# bar package configuration
bar
Then the following version-specific directories are added to sys.path
, in this order:
/usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/bar
/usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/foo
Note that bletch
is omitted because it doesn’t exist; the bar
directory precedes the foo
directory because bar.pth
comes alphabetically before foo.pth
; and spam
is omitted because it is not mentioned in either path configuration file.
After these path manipulations, an attempt is made to import a module named sitecustomize
, which can perform arbitrary site-specific customizations. It is typically created by a system administrator in the site-packages directory. If this import fails with an ImportError
exception, it is silently ignored. If Python is started without output streams available, as with pythonw.exe
on Windows (which is used by default to start IDLE), attempted output from sitecustomize
is ignored. Any exception other than ImportError
causes a silent and perhaps mysterious failure of the process.
After this, an attempt is made to import a module named usercustomize
, which can perform arbitrary user-specific customizations, if ENABLE_USER_SITE
is true. This file is intended to be created in the user site-packages directory (see below), which is part of sys.path
unless disabled by -s
. An ImportError
will be silently ignored.
Note that for some non-Unix systems, sys.prefix
and sys.exec_prefix
are empty, and the path manipulations are skipped; however the import of sitecustomize
and usercustomize
is still attempted.
site.
ENABLE_USER_SITE
-
Flag showing the status of the user site-packages directory.
True
means that it is enabled and was added tosys.path
.False
means that it was disabled by user request (with-s
orPYTHONNOUSERSITE
).None
means it was disabled for security reasons (mismatch between user or group id and effective id) or by an administrator.New in version 2.6.
site.
USER_SITE
-
Path to the user site-packages for the running Python. Can be
None
ifgetusersitepackages()
hasn’t been called yet. Default value is~/.local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages
for UNIX and non-framework Mac OS X builds,~/Library/Python/X.Y/lib/python/site-packages
for Mac framework builds, and%APPDATA%\Python\PythonXY\site-packages
on Windows. This directory is a site directory, which means that.pth
files in it will be processed.New in version 2.6.
site.
USER_BASE
-
Path to the base directory for the user site-packages. Can be
None
ifgetuserbase()
hasn’t been called yet. Default value is~/.local
for UNIX and Mac OS X non-framework builds,~/Library/Python/X.Y
for Mac framework builds, and%APPDATA%\Python
for Windows. This value is used by Distutils to compute the installation directories for scripts, data files, Python modules, etc. for the user installation scheme. See alsoPYTHONUSERBASE
.New in version 2.6.
site.
addsitedir
( sitedir, known_paths=None )-
Add a directory to sys.path and process its
.pth
files. Typically used insitecustomize
orusercustomize
(see above).
site.
getsitepackages
( )-
Return a list containing all global site-packages directories (and possibly site-python).
New in version 2.7.
site.
getuserbase
( )-
Return the path of the user base directory,
USER_BASE
. If it is not initialized yet, this function will also set it, respectingPYTHONUSERBASE
.New in version 2.7.
site.
getusersitepackages
( )-
Return the path of the user-specific site-packages directory,
USER_SITE
. If it is not initialized yet, this function will also set it, respectingPYTHONNOUSERSITE
andUSER_BASE
.New in version 2.7.
The site
module also provides a way to get the user directories from the command line:
$ python -m site --user-site
/home/user/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
If it is called without arguments, it will print the contents of sys.path
on the standard output, followed by the value of USER_BASE
and whether the directory exists, then the same thing for USER_SITE
, and finally the value of ENABLE_USER_SITE
.
If both options are given, user base and user site will be printed (always in this order), separated by os.pathsep
.
If any option is given, the script will exit with one of these values: 0
if the user site-packages directory is enabled, 1
if it was disabled by the user, 2
if it is disabled for security reasons or by an administrator, and a value greater than 2 if there is an error.
See also
PEP 370 – Per user site-packages directory