I’m used to installing and running my Ruby gems in user space with the help of rbenv. I wasn’t aware of a similar setup for Python, until today.

This Gist by Matthew guides you through all the steps you need to take. It’s quite simple, really.

# Uninstall sudo-requiring pip (only if pip is already installed)
sudo pip uninstall pip

# Download pip
curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o ~/Downloads/get-pip.py

# Install pip with the --user argument 
python ~/Downloads/get-pip.py --user

# Add Python's bin folder in ~/Library to your PATH environment variable
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/Library/Python/2.7/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

# Reload your config
source ~/.bashrc

Matthew mentions to remember to append --user when installing modules:

$ pip install <package_name> --user