Most Linux distributions come with wget.

Download ez_setup.py and run it using the target Python version. The script will download the appropriate version and install it for you:

> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python

Note that you will may need to invoke the command with superuser privileges to install to the system Python:

> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python

Alternatively, Setuptools may be installed to a user-local path:

> wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python - --user

Note that on some older systems (noted on Debian 6 and CentOS 5 installations), wget may refuse to download ez_setup.py, complaining that the certificate common name *.c.ssl.fastly.net does not match the host name bootstrap.pypa.io. In addition, the ez_setup.py script may then encounter similar problems using wget internally to download setuptools-x.y.zip, complaining that the certificate common name of www.python.org does not match the host namepypi.python.org. Those are known issues, related to a bug in the older versions of wget (see Issue 59). If you happen to encounter them, install Setuptools as follows:

> wget --no-check-certificate https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py
> python ez_setup.py --insecure

Unix including Mac OS X (curl)

If your system has curl installed, follow the wget instructions but replace wget with curl and -O with -o. For example:

> curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -o - | python