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You can use a specific environment variable PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE and make it point to a directory where your packages will be stored. If they are to be installed again, they will be taken from this directory.
There seems to be also an additional option for PIP pip --download-cache which ought to do something similar, but I have never tried it myself. For your example, to avoid re-downloading matplotlib every time, you would do the following:
pip install --download-cache /path/to/pip/cache matplotlib
Does that answer your question?
You could
# download and extract package to build path
pip install --no-install matplotlib
# the build path could be found by
pip install --help|grep Unpack\ packages\ into -A 2
# then rm pip-delete-this-directory.txt inside the build path
# this prevent pip from removing package from the build directory after install
# you could check the content of the file
rm build/pip-delete-this-directory.txt
# from now on you could install matplotlib quickly
# this uses single build directory
# and can speed up compiling by caching intermediate objects.
pip install --no-download matplotlib
Also, you could manually download the package
pip install -d dir_for_packages matplotlib
Then install it by un-tar and python setup install later.
The pip install --download-cache works in a similar way w/ extra checking: it firstly search for the latest or specified version of the target package from web, if the search has result and there is cached package in the directory specified by download-cache, the cached package will be used instead of downloading. For example,
pip install --download-cache . pymongo
will download pymongo package to current directory:
http%3A%2F%2Fpypi.python.org%2Fpackages%2Fsource%2Fp%2Fpymongo%2Fpymongo-2.1.1.tar.gz
http%3A%2F%2Fpypi.python.org%2Fpackages%2Fsource%2Fp%2Fpymongo%2Fpymongo-2.1.1.tar.gz.content-type