How do I find the location of my Python site-packages directory?

>>> import site; site.getsitepackages()
['/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages']

(or just first item with site.getsitepackages()[0])

A solution that:

• outside of virtualenv - provides the path of global site-packages,
• insidue a virtualenv - provides the virtualenv's site-packages

...is this one-liner:

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())"

Formatted for readability (rather than use as a one-liner), that looks like the following:

from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib
print(get_python_lib())

Source: an very old version of "How to Install Django" documentation (though this is useful to more than just Django installation)

For Ubuntu,

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

...is not correct.

It will point you to /usr/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

This folder only contains packages your operating system has automatically installed for programs to run.

On ubuntu, the site-packages folder that contains packages installed via setup_tools\easy_install\pip will be in /usr/local/lib/pythonX.X/dist-packages

The second folder is probably the more useful one if the use case is related to installation or reading source code.

If you do not use Ubuntu, you are probably safe copy-pasting the first code box into the terminal.

This is what worked for me:

python -m site --user-site