How it works...

You have at least two options to install Python packages. In the preceding old fashioned way, you download the source code and unpack it on your local computer. Next, you run the included setup.py script with the install flag. If you want, you can open the setup.py script in a text editor and take a more detailed look at exactly what the script is doing. You might need the sudo command, depending on the current user's system privileges.

As the second option, we leverage the pip installer, which automatically grabs the package from the remote repository and installs it to your local machine for use by the system-level Python installation. This is the preferred method, when available.