One of the things I’ve wanted to fix with Portable GIS is the method of installing new python packages. Since the version of Python included in Portable GIS is not in the windows registry, many python installers don’t work because they can’t find the installation. This includes packages like setuptools, and Pip, for easily installing packages from PyPi. While it’s possible to manually download a package and extract it into the correct location, that’s not fun, elegant, or sustainable, as it takes no account of dependencies or versions.

Enter this post from Nathan Woodrow’s blog. This points us at a bootstrapped installer for setuptools, which will install directly into a folder rather than looking in the registry. Simply download the linked ez___setup.py script, save it to your Portable Python directory (the one that actually includes python.exe) and run it. This should install setuptools into your Portable Python installation and allow you to use easy_install to grab packages (including Pip).

This will be included automatically in the next release of Portable GIS, but for now, it’s an easy do-it-yourself fix.