Installing PIL on 64-bit Ubuntu

I’ve just got a new laptop, and wanted to avoid messing around with symbolic links in order to install PIL in a virtual environment. I’ve just discovered patch, and thought I should automate my process of installing PIL (a process which previously involved me making a trivial edit to the setup.py file).

This is obviously not particularly revolutionary, but I thought it was quite neat, so thought I’d share it. The script (which is just bash) looks like this:

pip install -I PIL --no-install

cat <<EOF>setup_py.patch
--- setup.py 2013-04-21 21:09:42.349000664 +0100
+++ setup.py.patch 2013-04-21 21:10:20.685000986 +0100
@@ -34,8 +34,8 @@
 # TIFF_ROOT = libinclude("/opt/tiff")

TCL_ROOT = None
-JPEG_ROOT = None
-ZLIB_ROOT = None
+JPEG_ROOT = '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu'
+ZLIB_ROOT = '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu'
 TIFF_ROOT = None
 FREETYPE_ROOT = None
 LCMS_ROOT = None
EOF

patch $VIRTUAL_ENV/build/PIL/setup.py < setup_py.patch
pip install -I PIL --no-download

To use this, just save this as a bash script, and run it with an active virtualenv.

I’ve got another script which uses a similar approach to build Python 2.6 from source (a process which is necessary for running multiple versions of Python on Ubuntu), which I’ll share another day (once I’ve figured out if I can adjust the approach to install 2.4, 2.5, and 3.3¹).