Installing from source code with Distutils

(including the case of non-root user)

Ok here was one missing import: hashlib.

Well you can google python 2.4 hashlib and find a resource for that library.

If you find source code distribution like this one.

Download the source (this one comes in the zip file)

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/h/hashlib/hashlib-20081119.zip

with Unix wget or just get the file through your browser.

Then unzip the file, and jump into the directory

unzip hashlib-20081119.zip
cd unzip hashlib-20081119

There will be file setup.py (all python modules distributed with distutils have it).

Assuming that you have setuptools installed and that you have root access (for non-root there is a small modification to the command) you can finalize installation this way:

su
python setup.py install

or

sudo python setup.py install

An important part: python executable called by this command must be the same as the one used by the webserver process. Most likely - this is the case automatically, but sometimes it is not true.

To find out where the python is coming from type which python and you'll get something like

/usr/bin/python

Your system administrator must know which python executable is called by the webserver.

How to install modules without root access?

There will be only two small modifications to the command:

python setup.py --prefix /path/to/your/python/packages

You'll use --prefix parameter and sudo will not be needed because you have access to the directory /path/to/your/python/packages

Here is the full documentation for the python distutils.