Installing a third-party module

To add greater functionality, thousands of third-party modules, or packages, are available for download. Online module repositories include the Python Package Index (PyPI) as well as GitHub, and others. Python 2 and Python 3 now include a module designed to make installing these packages more simple than it was in the past. This module, pip, will check for registered modules in PyPI, and install the latest version using the command install. Use pip from the command prompt by passing the command install and the name of the package to install.

If the module is not available on PyPI, pip may not be able to install it. For instance, if it’s on GitHub instead (even Python 3.7 is now hosted on https://github.com/, so GitHub is worth knowing), download the zip file of the module, and unzip it into the Lib/site-packages folder. Open a Command Prompt terminal, change directory (cd) into the newly unzipped folder, and run the script setup.py that is part of each module, using the command python setup.py install. This script will install the module, and configure the environmental variables required to make it run.

Many Python modules are only available in the GZip format, which can be unzipped using freeware such as 7Zip. Unzip the .gz file, then unzip the resulting .tar file into the Lib/site-packages folder in the Python folder.