How to install PIL in system library using homebrew?

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In a new SnowLeopard install, I'd like to use homebrew to install PIL. However the recipe installs PIL under cellar instead of in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages. Is there a way to change the install directory?

Banns answered 5/4, 2011 at 3:26 Comment(0)

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Since there seems to be no "accepted" way of installing homebrew eggs into the system site-packages, here is what I ended up doing:

% brew install pil
% easy_install pip
% pip install pil

The homebrew install grabs and installs all of PIL's dependencies (especially jpeg). The later easy_install then uses them when compiling PIL for the system site-packages. Freetype support doesn't show up in the "easy-installed" version, but that's fine for my purposes.

As my initial goal was to provide a simple way for a web designer to build a django development environment, having an unused homebrew PIL installed is not really a problem.

Hope this helps someone. Still hoping there's a better answer out there.

Banns answered 7/4, 2011 at 3:50 Comment(0)

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Instead of installing pip and another PIL, you can just make a symlink

brew install pil
ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/pil/1.1.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL

Tested on Lion, on Snow Leopard, you may need to change paths to use /python2.6 /Python/2.6.

Hairless answered 17/10, 2011 at 11:0 Comment(5)

This is the best solution IMO. It's clean and simple. Homebrew installs its stuff in /usr/local/bin and trying to wrangle it out of there is really catastrophic (and a real pain). Better to symlink the PIL package to where most things OS X looks for it (under /Library/Python/{version} than bust up homebrew for one simple egg. – Siberson 21/1, 2012 at 4:38

I followed your steps but still couldn't import PIL – Verdi 19/5, 2012 at 9:56

This doesn't work for me on Mountain Lion. import Image still fails after creating the symlink. Aren't we supposed to add the path to a .pth file somewhere? – Epilate 30/10, 2012 at 15:8

@yorch Yes, it had been working from the start. The proper import is from PIL import Image, not import Image. – Epilate 4/1, 2013 at 13:59

On 10.8 I already had a /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL so ln failed silently. I had to move it away sudo mv /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL{,-original} and run ln again, now it works fine ! =D Thank @Hairless ! – Outbound 12/5, 2013 at 9:13

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It seems that Pillow replaced PIL in homebrew. The new command is:

brew install Homebrew/python/pillow

Abagael answered 19/4, 2014 at 19:59 Comment(0)

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12

Since there seems to be no "accepted" way of installing homebrew eggs into the system site-packages, here is what I ended up doing:

% brew install pil
% easy_install pip
% pip install pil

The homebrew install grabs and installs all of PIL's dependencies (especially jpeg). The later easy_install then uses them when compiling PIL for the system site-packages. Freetype support doesn't show up in the "easy-installed" version, but that's fine for my purposes.

As my initial goal was to provide a simple way for a web designer to build a django development environment, having an unused homebrew PIL installed is not really a problem.

Hope this helps someone. Still hoping there's a better answer out there.

Banns answered 7/4, 2011 at 3:50 Comment(0)

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As @BarnabasSzabolcs mentioned, newer versions named pillow. an alternative to brew install Homebrew/python/pillow is pip install pillow. You may need to add sudo, depends on your python environment permissions.

Amargo answered 26/4, 2016 at 13:45 Comment(0)

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For everyone reading this now, today this can be achieved with brew install pillow.

Pertinent answered 20/8 at 22:30 Comment(0)

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