If you go to PyPI.org and look up a package there, it will have a bunch of "Navigation" and "Project Links" links on the left side.
Start with Homepage if present. In the case of Requests, "Homepage" will take you to documentation where, right at the top, there's a link that says "Release v2.18.4 (Installation)". Click on that, and it'll tell you how to download and install from source.
If you can't find that for some package, try "Download" next, which will hopefully have nice friendly download links.
Failing that, click on "Download files", and you should get a table containing at least one entry of type "Source", with a link to a source tarball (or zipfile).
If you've found directions to install from source, great. If not, unpack the archive and scan through it trying to find an INSTALL
or README
or other doc that tells you have to install it.
Most current packages with up-to-date documentation are going to tell you to install the source (maybe after a manual build step) with pip install .
(with or without sudo
). If you really can't use pip
at all for some strange reason, usually you'll be OK doing this instead (again, with or without sudo
):
python setup.py install
However, you will often need to manually download and install some prerequisites. Look for a requirements.txt
file, and recursively download and install each thing on that list, then come back to this package.
Finally, at the end of all of this, you won't have any good record of what you installed, what versions you had, which packages were dependencies of other packages, etc. Upgrading to new versions, or migrating your environment to a different machine, will be a nightmare. And so on. All the stuff pip
does for you, you don't get if you don't use pip
. But if you really want to do it all manually, you can.