fistutils

distutils, setuptools and pip patched for use in Pythonista.

These may require the Pythonista beta version 1.6 or release version 2.0 to work properly, especially distutils, because it has to shadow the version from the stdlib. If you’re still on Pythonista 1.5, you’ll need to modify your sys.path manually on every run to make the patched distutils take priority over the version from the stdlib.

pip technically works, however there are still a number of issues:

1. pip MUST NOT BE USED TO UPDATE ITSELF! Otherwise all patches are overwritten and pip will no longer work on Pythonista. (The built-in update notification has been disabled in the pip.conf.)
2. After any “action” (i. e. installing, upgrading or uninstalling a module) is performed using pip, Pythonista must be rebooted. Otherwise pip‘s “state” (i. e. the database of installed modules and their versions) is not updated properly.
3. Only pure Python modules can be installed. Process forking is disallowed for all iOS apps, which makes invoking an external compiler impossible. Dynamic libraries can also only be loaded if signed by the app developer, meaning that any compiled libraries wouldn’t be usable. Oh, and that kind of thing is forbidden by Apple.
4. Modules that come with Pythonista are not recognized. This means that if a module is installed and one of its dependencies is already included in Pythonista, the module will be reinstalled into the user site-packages (if it is pure Python) or the installation will fail entirely (if it requires native code).
5. The cache does not work. Currently it is disabled manually through the pip.conf, because otherwise a warning about the cache directory’s permissions/owner is displayed every time.
6. There may be some odd warnings and strangely formatted output here and there, because the patches to pip are very hackish. It works, but it’s certainly not great.

Any suggestions on how to fix these are welcome. If you have working code, please do submit a pull request.

Installation

distutils

1. Move or copy the distutils folder into your site-packages folder.
2. Open the pydistutils.cfg file in the editor.
3. Run this command in the Python prompt to “install” the config file: import editor, os, shutil; shutil.copyfile(editor.get_path(), os.path.expanduser("~/.pydistutils.cfg"))

setuptools

1. Download a source version of setuptools (not a wheel) from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools. (Version 18.3.2 is known to work, future versions should as well, because only a single file is modified.)
2. Extract the downloaded archive using stash or another program.
3. Open site-patch.py and copy its entire contents, and paste them into <setuptools-source-folder>/setuptools/site-patch.py.
4. Open setuptools‘ setup.py script.
5. Tap and hold the “play” button, type install into the text field, and press Run.
6. Restart Pythonista. Double-press the home button to open the app switcher, swipe the Pythonista “window” up and off the screen, then open Pythonista again.

pip

1. Open pip‘s setup.py script.
2. Tap and hold the “play” button, type install into the text field, and press Run.
3. Open the pip.conf file in the editor.
4. Run this command in the Python prompt to “install” the config file: import editor, os, shutil; os.makedirs(os.path.expanduser("~/.config/pip")); shutil.copyfile(editor.get_path(), os.path.expanduser("~/.config/pip/pip.conf"))