As far as I can tell distutils is part of Python standard library, at least for Python 3. If you don't have it installed you must then have a botched Python installation (perhaps intentionally so by the hosting provider).
Regardless, the source for distutils can be found here. You only need to get a copy of it on the affected system (either via git clone
or by downloading and extracting a tarball) and then set PYTHONPATH
accordingly for get-pip.py to work:
9d3194663b77% git clone https://github.com/pypa/distutils
Cloning into 'distutils'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 1474, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (1474/1474), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (659/659), done.
remote: Total 13343 (delta 890), reused 1362 (delta 811), pack-reused 11869
Receiving objects: 100% (13343/13343), 5.14 MiB | 22.78 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (9592/9592), done.
9d3194663b77% cd distutils/distutils
9d3194663b77% ls
README bcppcompiler.py config.py dep_util.py extension.py log.py py38compat.py text_file.py versionpredicate.py
__init__.py ccompiler.py core.py dir_util.py fancy_getopt.py msvc9compiler.py spawn.py unixccompiler.py
_msvccompiler.py cmd.py cygwinccompiler.py dist.py file_util.py msvccompiler.py sysconfig.py util.py
archive_util.py command debug.py errors.py filelist.py py35compat.py tests version.py
9d3194663b77% cd ..
9d3194663b77% PYTHONPATH=. python3 ~/get-pip.py
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting pip
Downloading pip-21.0.1-py3-none-any.whl (1.5 MB)
|________________________________| 1.5 MB 7.1 MB/s
Collecting setuptools
Downloading setuptools-52.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (784 kB)
|________________________________| 784 kB 39.9 MB/s
Collecting wheel
Downloading wheel-0.36.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (35 kB)
Installing collected packages: wheel, setuptools, pip
WARNING: The script wheel is installed in '/home/test/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
WARNING: The scripts pip, pip3 and pip3.7 are installed in '/home/test/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
Successfully installed pip-21.0.1 setuptools-52.0.0 wheel-0.36.2
distutils
package is installed in the system.