Python: build extension module against library in non-standard path

I just installed a library (with a .so and a .h) in a custom $PREFIX (eg, $HOME/.local or $VIRTUAL_ENV).

Use this to pass custom -I and -L flags to the compiler:

python setup.py build_ext -I $PREFIX/include -L $PREFIX/lib install

Using virtualenv

If you’re using virtualenv (you should!), you can do the whole build of the library + python bindings with something like this:

cd /path/to/library-dir/
./configure --prefix="$VIRTUAL_ENV"
make && make install

cd /path/to/python-module-dir/
python setup.py build_ext \
    -I "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/include/ \
    -L "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/lib/ \
    -R "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/lib/ \
    install

The trick here is to use -I to tell te compiler where to look for header files, -L to tell the linker where to find libraries and -R to tell the linker where to search for libraries at runtime:

--include-dirs (-I)  list of directories to search for header files
                     (separated by ':')
--library-dirs (-L)  directories to search for external C libraries
                     (separated by ':')
--rpath (-R)         directories to search for shared C libraries at runtime

(from python setup.py build_ext --help)

Example: kyotocabinet

As a real-world use-case example, I used this method to install Kyoto Cabinet inside a virtualenv.

This is the complete procedure I followed:

mkdir -p "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/tmp

cd "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/tmp
wget http://fallabs.com/kyotocabinet/pkg/kyotocabinet-1.2.76.tar.gz
tar xzvf kyotocabinet-1.2.76.tar.gz
cd kyotocabinet-1.2.76/
./configure --prefix="$VIRTUAL_ENV"
make
make install

cd "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/tmp
wget http://fallabs.com/kyotocabinet/pythonlegacypkg/kyotocabinet-python-legacy-1.18.tar.gz
tar xzvf kyotocabinet-python-legacy-1.18.tar.gz
cd kyotocabinet-python-legacy-1.18/
python setup.py build_ext \
    -I "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/include/ -L "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/lib/ \
    -R "$VIRTUAL_ENV"/lib/ install

todo: put all this in the setup.py for the extension module, as eg. pyzmq does

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