I meant to say private use, not public use. But if I want to install from pip over the internet, which is my most common use case it needs to be publicly accessible, right? Which for me means GitHub, bitbucket, pypi, or some other bespoke solution just to avoid "publishing" something for my own private use. Or do I misunderstand?

You can publish to a local instance of PyPi

https://www.linode.com/docs/applications/project-management/...

I could do lots of things that would be unnecessarily burdensome for the dubious benefit of having my package unpublished. If it's acceptable to install it on a local network I can just do it directly from a normal filesystem.

GitHub and Bitbucket have private repositories and you can install from those using pip. There's nothing forcing you to make something public.

I know about private repos. The hangup was installing from them. Last time I looked up how to have private python packages the the impression I got was "It's not possible." But now with a single Google search I see that it's very much possible (by using ssh). Not sure what changed other than two years have gone by.