Pip (package manager)

First introduced as pyinstall in 2008 by Ian Bicking (the creator of the virtualenv package) as an alternative to easy install, pip was chosen as the new name from one of several suggestions that the creator received on his blog post. According to Bicking himself, the name is a recursive acronym for "Pip Installs Packages". In 2011, the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) was created to take over the maintenance of pip and virtualenv from Bicking, led by Carl Meyer, Brian Rosner, and Jannis Leidel. == Command-line interface ==

Pip's command-line interface allows the install of Python software packages by issuing a command: pip install some-package-name Users can also remove the package by issuing a command: pip uninstall some-package-name pip has a feature to manage full lists of packages and corresponding version numbers, possible through a "requirements" file. This permits the efficient re-creation of an entire group of packages in a separate environment (e.g. another computer) or virtual environment. This can be achieved with a properly formatted file and the following command, where requirements.txt is the name of the file: pip install -r requirements.txt To install some package for a specific python version, pip provides the following command, where ${version} is replaced by 2, 3, 3.4, etc.: pip${version} install some-package-name Using Pip provides a way to install user-defined projects locally with the use of a file. This method requires the Python project to have the following file structure: example_project/ ├── exampleproject/ Python package with source code. | ├── __init__.py Make the folder a package. |  └── example.py Example module. └── README.md README with info of the project. Within this structure, user can add to the root of the project (i.e. for above structure) with the following content: from setuptools import setup, find_packages setup( name="example", # Name of the package. This will be used, when the project is imported as a package. version="0.1.0", packages=find_packages(include=["exampleproject", "exampleproject.*"]) # Pip will automatically install the dependencies provided here. ) After this, pip can install this custom project by running the following command, from the project root directory: pip install -e. == Custom repository ==

Besides the default Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, pip supports custom repositories also. Such repositories can be located on a Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP(s) URL, or on a file system. A custom repository can be specified using the or option, thusly: pip install -i https://your-custom-repo/simple or with a filesystem: pip install -i /path/to/your/custom-repo/simple == See also ==