Offline installation with pip and python3-venv

Credit: Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

My situation: I want to be able to download Python packages so that I can install it on an offline-machine, where both the offline and online Linux machines are the same operating systems.

Related Article: Offline installation with apt-get and yum package manager

Creating the virtual environment

python3 -m venv <NAME_OF_VIRTUALENV_FILE>

Using the venv:

source <NAME_OF_VIRTUALENV>/bin/activate

Creating the requirements list

Install the packages you want to move over to your offline machine

pip install <Packages>

Once you have installed packages that you want save the package list into requirements.txt

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Remove package-resources == 0.0.0 in requirements.txt

Download packages from the requirements list

---

[optional] create a download folder for your [packages]

mkdir <DIR_NAME>
cd <DIR_NAME>

---

pip download -r <PATH_TO>/requirements.txt

pip will download compressed files of packages in the name of *.whl although this is not always the case.

Transfer over the downloaded files and requirements.txt to the offline machine.

Installing downloaded packages

I personally create a virtual environment on my offline machine, which are the same instructions mentioned in the create virtual environment section.

pip install --no-index --find-links <PATH_TO_DOWNLOADED PACKAGES> -r requirements.txt

--no-index - ignore package index, this is required to stop python from attempting to lookup the PyPi (online a directory)

--find-links - specifying the path to the downloaded packages