Python PIP

Package management is one of the important feature of a programming language. It is necessary to pack code and packages so that we can move them. PIP is a package management system used to install packages from repository. You can use pip to install various software packages available on http://pypi.python.org/pypi. Pip as the name says

pip installs packages.

In this article we will see how we can use pip for installing packages in Python.

Installing pip

Python 2.7.9 and later (python2 series), and Python 3.4 and later (python 3 series) already comes with pip.

To check your python version you need to enter the following command:

Python -V

If the output of the above command is more then 2.7,we will be having pip already installed and running else we need to install pip from the above link as defined. The major advantage of pip is the ease of its command-line interface, which makes installing Python software packages

Here are some of the commands used with pip in installing the python packages,

1) Install a Package called “request”

[root@vx111a ~]# pip install requests
Collecting requests
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py:90: InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, seehttps://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.
  InsecurePlatformWarning
  Downloading requests-2.9.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (500kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 503kB 1.2MB/s
Installing collected packages: requests
Successfully installed requests-2.9.0

2) Un-install a package

[root@vx111a ~]# pip uninstall requests
DEPRECATION: Uninstalling a distutils installed project (requests) has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. This is due to the fact that uninstalling a distutils project will only partially uninstall the project.
Uninstalling requests-1.1.0:
  /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-1.1.0-py2.7.egg-info
Proceed (y/n)? y
  Successfully uninstalled requests-1.1.0

3) Upgrade a Package to a new version

[root@vx111a ~]# pip install --upgrade requests
Requirement already up-to-date: requests in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages

4) Search for packages

pip search requests

5) List available pacakges

[root@vx111a ~]# pip list
backports.ssl-match-hostname (3.4.0.2)
blivet (0.18.34)
Brlapi (0.6.0)
chardet (2.0.1)
configobj (4.7.2)
configshell-fb (1.1.11)

6) check for outdated packages
pip list --outdated

ipaddr (Current: 2.1.9 Latest: 2.1.11 [sdist])
rtslib-fb (Current: 2.1.46 Latest: 2.1.58 [sdist])
backports.ssl-match-hostname (Current: 3.4.0.2 Latest: 3.5.0.1 [sdist])
netaddr (Current: 0.7.5 Latest: 0.7.18 [wheel])
pyudev (Current: 0.15 Latest: 0.18.1 [sdist])
urllib3 (Current: 1.5 Latest: 1.13.1 [wheel])
python-augeas (Current: 0.4.1 Latest: 0.5.0 [sdist])

Hope this helps. More to come