Situation: I have created a virtual environment and use an explicit path to run pip (without sourcing activate). Does it install packages in the global dist-packages or does it install them in the virtual environment's site-packages.
Details:
As Where does pip install its packages? explains, pip installs packages in <virtualenv_name>/lib/<python_ver>/site-packages when used with a virtual environment. From my experience, this is true when I activate the virtualenv. I have an existing bash script that paths directly to the pip executable without activating the virtualenv. Does this still install packages in the virtualenv's site-packages? Or does it install them in /local/lib/<python-version>/dist-packages?
Note: I'm on Ubuntu 16.04
This very much depends on which version (not in the semantic version sense, but of the having-multiple-"versions" of pip installed when you create a venv) of pip your script is using, as well as its configuration (including possibly your environment).
Assuming your script has a line like
/some/path/to/pip install <some package>
and assuming that that pip has installed at least one package, you can use
/some/path/to/pip show <that package>
and it'll give you output that looks like:
$ pip show numpy
Name: numpy
Version: 1.14.5
Summary: NumPy: array processing for numbers, strings, records, and objects.
Home-page: http://www.numpy.org
Author: Travis E. Oliphant et al.
Author-email: None
License: BSD
Location: /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
Requires:
The location line second to last should help answering your question.