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Accepted
singrium
Asked: 2018-11-29 07:40:11 +0800 CST

where are cached python packages stored in Ubuntu?

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I thought to post this question in Stackoverflow, but I decided to post it here because it probably depends on the OS.
When I install a python package using pip, at the first time it is downloaded from pypi: 

pip install numpy
Collecting numpy
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/de/37/fe7db552f4507f379d81dcb78e58e05030a8941757b1f664517d581b5553/numpy-1.15.4-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (13.8MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 13.8MB 792kB/s 
Installing collected packages: numpy
Successfully installed numpy-1.15.4

When I uninstall it and reinstall it again, the package is not downloaded. Instead, a cached version is used to install it: 

pip install numpy
Collecting numpy
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/de/37/fe7db552f4507f379d81dcb78e58e05030a8941757b1f664517d581b5553/numpy-1.15.4-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl
Installing collected packages: numpy
Successfully installed numpy-1.15.4

Sometimes, the installation get corrupted, or problems occur during the installation. So I need to reinstall the same package again. but since there is a cached version, the re-installation will use the same corrupted version. So I need to delete that cached version in order to do a clean installation.
for that reason, my question is: where are cached python packages stored in Ubuntu?

python cache 18.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Thanks to @muru, I found the answer in Stackoverflow. I quote from it:

    The default location for the cache directory depends on the Operating System:

    For Ubuntu, it is located in:

    ~/.cache/pip and it respects the XDG_CACHE_HOME directory.

    WheelCache
    Pip will read from the subdirectory wheels within the pip cache directory and use any packages found there.

    More information can be found in this link

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