Figuring out how to properly install and use pip took me a heck of a lot longer than it should. This post makes a note of the hassle.

What could/should have been done:

sudo pacman -S python-pip
sudo pip install virtualenv

It's really that simple - these steps can give me a "vitualenv" command.What I was concerned about - which led me away from doing the above, is the effect of using sudo. Because of the way gem install jekyll simply works, I was thinking that using sudo might do unpleasant things with my global python environment.

I think using sudo pip install something indeed does install packages into the global environment - but indeed that's what I was meant to do in the first place.

Background

I was following this Getting Started with Django on Heroku tutorial. I failed at installing virtualenv: pip install virtualenv returned python stacktraces saying that permission is denied for /usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/.

I somehow thought that this error showing up is a sign of my global environment not properly set up (instead of missing the sudo in front of the pip).