edit: Manual installation and use of setuptools is not the standard process anymore.

If you're running Python 2.7.9+ or Python 3.4+

Congrats, you should already have pip installed. If you do not, read onward.

If you're running a Unix-like System

You can usually install the package for pip through your package manager if your version of Python is older than 2.7.9 or 3.4, or if your system did not include it for whatever reason.

Instructions for some of the more common distros follow.

Installing on Debian (Wheezy and newer) and Ubuntu (Trusty Tahr and newer) for Python 2.x

Run the following command from a terminal:

sudo apt-get install python-pip 

Installing on Debian (Wheezy and newer) and Ubuntu (Trusty Tahr and newer) for Python 3.x

Run the following command from a terminal:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

On a fresh Debian/Ubuntu install, the package may not be found until you do:

sudo apt-get update

Installing pip on CentOS 7 for Python 2.x

On CentOS 7, you have to install setup tools first, and then use that to install pip, as there is no direct package for it.

sudo yum install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip

Installing pip on CentOS 7 for Python 3.x

Assuming you installed Python 3.4 from EPEL, you can install Python 3's setup tools and use it to install pip.

# First command requires you to have enabled EPEL for CentOS7
sudo yum install python34-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip

If your Unix/Linux distro doesn't have it in package repos

Install using the manual way detailed below.

The manual way

If you want to do it the manual way, the now-recommended method is to install using the get-pip.py script from pip's installation instructions.

Install pip

To install pip, securely download get-pip.py

Then run the following (which may require administrator access):

python get-pip.py 

If setuptools is not already installed, get-pip.py will install setuptools for you.

Python 3.4+ and 2.7.9+

Good news! Python 3.4 (released March 2014) and Python 2.7.9 (released December 2014) ship with Pip. This is the best feature of any Python release. It makes the community's wealth of libraries accessible to everyone. Newbies are no longer excluded from using community libraries by the prohibitive difficulty of setup. In shipping with a package manager, Python joins Ruby, Node.js, Haskell, Perl, Go—almost every other contemporary language with a majority open-source community. Thank you, Python.

If you do find that pip is not available, simply run ensurepip.

• On Windows:

  py -3 -m ensurepip
  

• Otherwise:

  python3 -m ensurepip
  

Of course, that doesn't mean Python packaging is problem solved. The experience remains frustrating. I discuss this in the Stack Overflow question Does Python have a package/module management system?.

Python 3 ≤ 3.3 and 2 ≤ 2.7.8

Flying in the face of its 'batteries included' motto, Python ships without a package manager. To make matters worse, Pip was—until recently—ironically difficult to install.

Official instructions

Per https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#do-i-need-to-install-pip:

Download get-pip.py, being careful to save it as a .py file rather than .txt. Then, run it from the command prompt:

python get-pip.py

You possibly need an administrator command prompt to do this. Follow Start a Command Prompt as an Administrator (Microsoft TechNet).

This installs the pip package, which (in Windows) contains ...\Scripts\pip.exe that path must be in PATH environment variable to use pip from the command line (see the second part of 'Alternative Instructions' for adding it to your PATH,

Alternative instructions

The official documentation tells users to install Pip and each of its dependencies from source. That's tedious for the experienced and prohibitively difficult for newbies.

For our sake, Christoph Gohlke prepares Windows installers (.msi) for popular Python packages. He builds installers for all Python versions, both 32 and 64 bit. You need to:

1. Install setuptools
2. Install pip

For me, this installed Pip at C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe. Find pip.exe on your computer, then add its folder (for example, C:\Python27\Scripts) to your path (Start / Edit environment variables). Now you should be able to run pip from the command line. Try installing a package:

pip install httpie

There you go (hopefully)! Solutions for common problems are given below:

Proxy problems

If you work in an office, you might be behind an HTTP proxy. If so, set the environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy. Most Python applications (and other free software) respect these. Example syntax:

http://proxy_url:port
http://username:password@proxy_url:port

If you're really unlucky, your proxy might be a Microsoft NTLM proxy. Free software can't cope. The only solution is to install a free software friendly proxy that forwards to the nasty proxy. http://cntlm.sourceforge.net/

Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

Python modules can be partly written in C or C++. Pip tries to compile from source. If you don't have a C/C++ compiler installed and configured, you'll see this cryptic error message.

Error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

You can fix that by installing a C++ compiler such as MinGW or Visual C++. Microsoft actually ships one specifically for use with Python. Or try Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7.

Often though it's easier to check Christoph's site for your package.

On Linux or MacOS:

Copypython -m ensurepip --upgrade

If you want to install pip for Python 3, replace python with python3.

See https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/ for more details.