pip allows you to set its default options by using the following facilities, in the order of each item’s importance:
That means it will check each of those configuration sources and set the defaults appropriately.
pip allows you to set all command line option defaults in a standard ini style config file.
The names of the settings are derived from the long command line option, e.g. if you want to use a different package index (--index-url) and set the HTTP timeout (--default-timeout) to 60 seconds your config file would look like this:
[global]
timeout = 60
index-url = http://download.zope.org/ppix
Each subcommand can be configured optionally in its own section so that every global setting with the same name will be overridden; e.g. decreasing the timeout to 10 seconds when running the freeze (`Freezing Requirements`_) command and using 60 seconds for all other commands is possible with:
[global]
timeout = 60
[freeze]
timeout = 10
Boolean options like --ignore-installed or --no-dependencies can be set like this:
[install]
ignore-installed = true
no-dependencies = yes
Appending options like --find-links can be written on multiple lines:
[global]
find-links =
http://download.example.com
[install]
find-links =
http://mirror1.example.com
http://mirror2.example.com
The names and locations of the configuration files vary slightly across platforms.
On Unix and Mac OS X the configuration file is: $HOME/.pip/pip.conf
And on Windows, the configuration file is: %HOME%\pip\pip.ini
Just like with config files, each of pip’s command line options (long version, e.g. --find-links) are automatically set by looking for environment variables with the name format PIP_<UPPER_NAME>. That means the name of the command line options are capitalized and have dashes (-) replaced with underscores (_).
For example, to redefine the default timeout you can also set an environment variable:
export PIP_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT=60
pip install ipython
Which is the same as passing the option to pip directly:
pip --default-timeout=60 install ipython
This also works for appending command line options, like --find-links. Just leave an empty space between the passsed values, e.g.:
export PIP_FIND_LINKS="http://mirror1.example.com http://mirror2.example.com"
is the same as calling:
pip install --find-links=http://mirror1.example.com --find-links=http://mirror2.example.com