Live Edit Pip Packages

Quick tip for those of you who have just discovered a pip package you’d like to fix or otherwise contribute to.

sudo pip install -e .

This command installs the pip package in an “editable” way (in fact, -e is the short form of --editable) where you can make live changes to the source code without needing to uninstall and reinstall the package.

The only downside to this method is that there is no corresponding uninstall command, at least not one that actually removes any installed command-line tools from your /usr/local/bin. There’s some discussion on the matter at StackOverflow, but I haven’t found any one-size-fits-all solution yet. However, the benefits outweigh this small annoyance for me.