Permanently add a directory to PYTHONPATH?

If you're using bash (on a Mac or GNU/Linux distro), add this to your ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH="${PYTHONPATH}:/my/other/path"

You need to add your new directory to the environment variable PYTHONPATH, separated by a colon from previous contents thereof. In any form of Unix, you can do that in a startup script appropriate to whatever shell you're using (.profile or whatever, depending on your favorite shell) with a command which, again, depends on the shell in question; in Windows, you can do it through the system GUI for the purpose.

superuser.com may be a better place to ask further, i.e. for more details if you need specifics about how to enrich an environment variable in your chosen platform and shell, since it's not really a programming question per se.

Instead of manipulating PYTHONPATH you can also create a path configuration file. First find out in which directory Python searches for this information:

python -m site --user-site

For some reason this doesn't seem to work in Python 2.7. There you can use:

python -c 'import site; site._script()' --user-site

Then create a .pth file in that directory containing the path you want to add (create the directory if it doesn't exist).

For example:

# find directory
SITEDIR=$(python -m site --user-site)

# create if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p "$SITEDIR"

# create new .pth file with our path
echo "$HOME/foo/bar" > "$SITEDIR/somelib.pth"

In case anyone is still confused - if you are on a Mac, do the following:

1. Open up Terminal
2. Type open .bash_profile
3. In the text file that pops up, add this line at the end: export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:foo/bar
4. Save the file, restart the Terminal, and you're done