Its pretty easy to install openCV to your machine or vagrant box but its not as easy to install onto your virtualenv without brew. I enjoy brew, it has helped me tremendously and I’ve nothing against it. But I also like to have control over what I compile and where I place it.

Tested on :

• Yosemite
• El Capitan

Setup

1. Install pip, virtualenv and activate the current environment as that new env;

   $ sudo easy_install pip
   $ pip install virtualenv
   $ virtualenv env
   $ source env/bin/activate
   

   throughout this post dont deactivate your virtual env

   Install numpy dependency

   (env)$ pip install numpy
   

2. Download opencv here and unzip it. For this tutorial this is v3.0.0.

   (env)$ cd /path/to/your/opencv-3.0.0
   (env)$ mkdir release
   (env)$ cd release
   (env)$ cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$VIRTUAL_ENV -D PYTHON2_PACKAGES_PATH=$VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages -D

   ...