Installing Py on Leopard

Installing py on Max OS X Leopard is really easy. It’s as easy as sudo easy_install py, if you have the latest version of setuptools installed. py requires a more recent version(0.6C8) of setup tools than the one thats available in System Frameworks(0.6C7). Well, thats not too bad, we can just upgrade setuptools.

However, there are a couple of problems associated with upgrading setup tools:

1. easy_install installs its packages to /Library/Python/<version>/site-packages
2. The easy_install command itself is dependent on setuptools and this points to the older version under System Frameworks

After some google time, I was unable to find an easy way to upgrade setuptools. So I went into hack mode and got it to work. I really hope there is a better method than this:

1. Upgrade setuptools

   You can do this either by downloading the latest setuptools package or using the sudo easy_install -U setuptools command.

2. Find the easy_install executable script.

   It’s probably at /usr/bin/easy_install

3. Edit the file and update all the references of setuptools to point to the latest version. s/0.6C7/0.6C9

4. Now sudo easy_install py should just work.