It is possible to make both per-user (local) and system-wide (global)
installations of a package. If the user performing the installation is
root (or Administrator with elevated privileges on Windows), the
packages by default install in a system-wide directory that defaults to
OCTAVE_HOME/share/octave/packages/. If the user is not
root (or Octave is running without elevated privileges),
packages are installed locally. The default installation directory for
local packages is
user_data_dir/octave/OCTAVE_API_VERSION/packages.
Packages will be installed in a subdirectory of the installation
directory that will be named after the package. It is possible to
change the installation directory by using the pkg prefix
command:
pkg prefix new_installation_directory
The current installation directory can be retrieved by typing
current_installation_directory = pkg ("prefix")
The package manager stores some information about the installed
packages in configuration files. For per-user (local) packages, this
information is stored in the file
user_config_dir/octave/OCTAVE_API_VERSION/octave_packages
by default. For system-wide (global) installations, it is stored in
OCTAVE_HOME/share/octave/octave_packages. The path to the
per-user file can be changed with the pkg local_list command:
pkg local_list /path/to/new_file
For system-wide installations, this can be changed in the same way
using the pkg global_list command. If these commands are called
without a new path, the current path will be returned. To retain these
settings between sessions, they can be set in one of the startup files,
see Startup Files.