This is solved, in as much as I can install, but I don't understand what is causing the issue
Whenever I install any package with PIP I get a Permission error as follows
sudo pip install <packagename>
Downloading/unpacking requests
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 104, in main
status = self.run(options, args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/commands/install.py", line 245, in run
requirement_set.prepare_files(finder, force_root_egg_info=self.bundle, bundle=self.bundle)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req.py", line 971, in prepare_files
location = req_to_install.build_location(self.build_dir, not self.is_download)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req.py", line 153, in build_location
_make_build_dir(build_dir)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req.py", line 1225, in _make_build_dir
os.makedirs(build_dir)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/os.py", line 157, in makedirs
mkdir(name, mode)
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/alex/build'
I've taken to creating a tmp dir in my home directory, making it totally writable and then installing there as follows
mkdir temp
chmod 777 temp
cd temp/
sudo pip install packagename
Which then works. Any idea why I have to go through this?
There are only a few possible problems (listed in my comment to the question).
The first one is the one that turned out to be the actual problem here, and is probably also the most likely for future searchers/readers, so let's just focus on that.
If /home/alex/build is not writable even for root, you will get exactly this error from sudo pip. For example, if /home is mounted from a CD drive, not even root can write to a CD-ROM.
One common reason for people to have non-root-writable home directories is network shares. For example, if you mount an NFS share sqsh_root, your local root is not root to the share, so it can only write to world-writable directories. If you mount an SMB share to use domain permissions, the Windows-networking equivalent of the same will be true.
There are a number of parameters to pip that let you customize things. I think --build is the one you want, but try pip install --help to see all of them. (Also, make sure you're up to date. The pip devs have been adding and fixing convenience/customization features quite a bit while waiting on the near future of Python packaging to be decided.)
If worst comes to worst, you can do a --user installation without sudo, then use sudo to move the package and egg-info files from your user site-packages to the system.