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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I have used Pip, Virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper-win on windows with very little trouble... except for anything that isn't pure Python.

In order to install PIL in a virtualenv on windows I ultimately ended up downloading the PIL windows installer, extracting the required files and placing them in the virtualenvs site packages directory.

This is what needs fixing! Pip with access to compiled windows binaries.

Install Pip on windows: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4921215

Virtualenv Win: https://github.com/davidmarble/virtualenvwrapper-win

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> This is what needs fixing! Pip with access to compiled windows binaries.

That's the same issue really. Pip can't install (by design) binary distributions. Neither eggs nor .exes. So you are limited to easy_install on windows in many cases.

Self hosted PyPI (with eggbasket or even a static dir listing), combined with easy_install, is an old and unsexy solution that just works. Instead of saying we are limited to easy_install on Windows, I say we are embraced by setuptools on all platforms.

Inside your virtualenv you can just easy_install pil_installer.exe.

Edit: I think I should expand on the limitations of this. You can do this to any exe that was built with distutils, which you can check by changing the file extension to zip and seeing if it opens up.

A workaround is to edit the registry to make the virtualenv available as an install target:

http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201007/installing_python_packa...

Thanks for the link! That is interesting.

I followed though to the SO thread and discovered that you can install windows .exe installers using easy_install into virtualenvs. That is really usefull, its a shame that PyPi doesn't also link to the windows installers so that you wouldn't have to put the path to a windows initialler in.

Install windows binary packages into virtualenvs with easy_install - http://stackoverflow.com/a/5442340

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