How do I check from within python whether LaTeX and TeX Live are installed on a computer?

Question

I am writing a python program which generates TeX code that gets compiled into a PDF document. For this to work, I need to make sure that the user has some distribution of LaTeX installed on their computer. How do I do this from within Python 2.7 in a platform-independent way?

Answer 1

Update for Python 3.11 and 3.12+:

According to PEP 632, distutils has been deprecated, use shutil.which:

if shutil.which('latex'): print('latex installed')

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Before Python 3.10:

from distutils.spawn import find_executable
if find_executable('latex'): print('latex installed')

This should do what you want.