installation – How do I find the location of my Python site-packages directory?

There are two types of site-packages directories, global and per user.

Global site-packages (dist-packages) directories are listed in sys.path when you run:
```
python -m site
```
For a more concise list run getsitepackages from the site module in Python code:
```
python -c import site; print(site.getsitepackages())
```
Note: With virtualenvs getsitepackages is not available, sys.path from above will list the virtualenvs site-packages directory correctly, though. In Python 3, you may use the sysconfig module instead:
```
python3 -c import sysconfig; print(sysconfig.get_paths()[purelib])
```
The per user site-packages directory (PEP 370) is where Python installs your local packages:
```
python -m site --user-site
```
If this points to a non-existing directory check the exit status of Python and see python -m site --help for explanations.

Hint: Running pip list --user or pip freeze --user gives you a list of all installed per user site-packages.

Practical Tips

<package>.__path__ lets you identify the location(s) of a specific package: (details)

$ python -c import setuptools as _; print(_.__path__)
[/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/setuptools]

<module>.__file__ lets you identify the location of a specific module: (difference)
```
$ python3 -c import os as _; print(_.__file__)
/usr/lib/python3.6/os.py
```

Run pip show <package> to show Debian-style package information:

$ pip show pytest
Name: pytest
Version: 3.8.2
Summary: pytest: simple powerful testing with Python
Home-page: https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/
Author: Holger Krekel, Bruno Oliveira, Ronny Pfannschmidt, Floris Bruynooghe, Brianna Laugher, Florian Bruhin and others
Author-email: None
License: MIT license
Location: /home/peter/.local/lib/python3.4/site-packages
Requires: more-itertools, atomicwrites, setuptools, attrs, pathlib2, six, py, pluggy

>>> import site; site.getsitepackages()
[/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages, /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages]

(or just first item with site.getsitepackages()[0])

installation – How do I find the location of my Python site-packages directory?

A solution that:

outside of virtualenv – provides the path of global site-packages,
insidue a virtualenv – provides the virtualenvs site-packages

…is this one-liner:

python -c from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())

Formatted for readability (rather than use as a one-liner), that looks like the following:

from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib
print(get_python_lib())

Source: an very old version of How to Install Django documentation (though this is useful to more than just Django installation)