website/content/blog/pipeditable.md

title	date	draft	tags	medium_enabled
Pip Editable	2020-04-11T20:38:33-04:00	false	Python	true

I've found it to be incredibly helpful to emulate having a library installed on my system rather than depending on my local directory path to pick up my file edits. To do this in a python project, we need to add the --editable flag to a pip install.

First uninstall whatever version of your library you have.

pip uninstall library

Then in your folder with the setup.py run the following command

pip install --editable .

This will then create a symlink from your site-packages directory to the directory in which your code lives.

Once you're ready to install it formally,

pip uninstall library
pip install .

Distribute it,

pip wheel .