Otdfbt

I am attempting to install django to a virtualenv that already exists.

Following the instructions listed on the pip-install website here, I ran the following from SSH.

name@server:~$ . myenv.env/bin/activate
(myenv.env)nam@server:~$ pip install django

However at the bottom of the installation, I am seeing this:

creating /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django

error: could not create '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django': Permission denied

It appears that it is trying to install it to the global directory. I do not have sudo privileges. Am I doing something wrong here?

Update:
$PATH = /var/django/myenv.env/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

Sorry for a year late answer! I had the same problem and fixed it, I don't know if you changed the name of a directory after creating the virtual environment, I did though. If so then here's what I did.

1.) deactivate your v-env. After the fix you need to restart the v-env, so might as well deactivate now. right?

2.) Now, since we created the v-env in a different path, we have to change the static path variables in these files.

To get pip working you don't need to do this, but I still do.
bin/activate,
bin/activate.csh,
bin/activate.fish

bin/pip,
bin/pip2,
bin/pip2.7

bin/easy_install,
bin/easy_install2.7

3.) To get pip working, you must correct the python interpreter in the pip file, this as well has a static interpreter location set by virtualenv in the creation process.

4.) To get easy_install working? You guessed it, fix the interpreter location.

I hope this helped for any people reading this in the future. Sorry OP, for being late.

I had this same problem.

I deleted the virtual environment and created a new one, which solved the problem.

Probably not the answer you were hoping for, but since it's the only one...

Well without administrative privileges you're very limited on what you are able to do. If you are not allowed to elevate yourself or ask for privileges, the best way I found to go about that would be to create another environment, make a requirements.txt file, download all the packages you need to your machine( django ) that would also be located in your requirements file and it should work.

Had the same problem. In my case the reason was that the created virtual env was for python2.7 (the default) but I was using pip3 to install a package. pip3 was not present in my virtualenv so it defaulted to the global one. For me the fix was to use

virtualenv flask --python=python3

to create the env.

I had encountered the same problem caused by renaming of user.
Crispy's answer is totally right. And my solution may be more convenient.

setps:

1. Enter your virtual environment's bin path, such as cd ~/virenv_dir/bin

2. Rename all files under this directory using sed command. sed -i 's/old_name/new_name/' *

In my case, I had defined two aliases (to overcome some other issue on the default python version):

alias pip='/usr/bin/pip3'
alias python='/usr/bin/python3'

And this was causing the same symptoms:

[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages'

Removing the aliases solved the issue (before or after creating the virtualenv)