Installing gevent on shared hosting server

Recently, I had to install “gevent” python module on webfaction. Normally, I would install it using “pip install gevent” – Very straight forward. But python gevent module requires libevent library, specifically the .so file. This file normally resides in /usr/lib, but on shared host you do not have permissions to write to this location, hence the normal method wouldn’t work.  The trick is to install the .so in custom location, but more importantly, ask pip to use this non-standard location using –install-option command line option

Here are the steps I followed :

wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-1.4.13-stable.tar.gz

tar xvzf libevent-1.4.13-stable.tar.gz

mkdir ~/externals

cd libevent-1.4.13-stable

./configure –prefix=$HOME/externals/

make

make install

pip install –install-option=”-I$HOME/externals/include” –install-option=”-L$HOME/externals/lib” gevent