The “normal” way is to:
- Go to the Beautiful Soup web site, http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
- Download the package
- Unpack it
- In a Terminal window,
cdto the resulting directory - Type
python setup.py install
Another solution is to use easy_install. Go to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall), install the package using the instructions on that page, and then type, in a Terminal window:
easy_install BeautifulSoup4
# for older v3:
# easy_install BeautifulSoup
easy_install will take care of downloading, unpacking, building, and installing the package. The advantage to using easy_install is that it knows how to search for many different Python packages, because it queries the PyPI registry. Thus, once you have easy_install on your machine, you install many, many different third-party packages simply by one command at a shell.