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A Beginner's Guide to pip (Summary)

A Beginner's Guide to pip Austin Cepalia 00:42

You’ve seen that pip is a package manager for Python, used by many projects to manage dependencies. It’s included with the Python installer, which makes it an essential tool for all Pythonistas to know how to use.

Python provides an extensive standard library suitable for developing all sorts of applications, but the active Python community provides an even larger set of tools and libraries that speed up Python application development.

These tools and libraries are published to the Python Package Index (PyPI), and pip allows developers to install them in their application environments.

In this course, you learned about:

Installing new packages using pip in the command line and with requirement files
Managing dependencies, separating development and production requirements, and creating a locked requirements file
Finding packages through pip and PyPI
Evaluating package dependencies before uninstalling a package and how pip uninstalls packages

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00:00 In this course, you’ve learned how to perform the most common package management functions using pip. You learned the basics of how Python programs run within your operating system; how virtual environments can be used to resolve installation issues; how to install and manage packages using pip, the Python package manager; how package managers make managing dependencies easier; how to find new packages with PyPI; and finally, how to evaluate package dependencies before uninstalling one. I’m Austin Cepalia with realpython.com. Happy coding!

Alain Rouleau on July 24, 2020

Lots of great info, thanks!

Santosh on Aug. 20, 2020

Love it, very succinct.

Ghani on Oct. 27, 2020

Very useful course; I filled a few gaps. Thank you very much!

fosterlee on Dec. 29, 2020

I didn’t realize you could bind a package version:

# requirements.txt
requests>=2.21.0, <3.0

…the comma – and everything after – was all new to me!

Thanks!

Matyi on March 30, 2021

Very useful course, it summed up a lot of things in just a half an hour what I had learned from years of experiences. Even I filled a few gaps. Thank you very much!

Pedro Faria on May 2, 2021

You can still improve this lecture by using slides that show diagrammatic views of the files, programs, directories and their relationships, as well as operations. It’s much more pleasant than having to constantly look at the command line, especially because you can give an overview of what you’re about to explain. This goes for every lecture in this website: separate each video into conceptual view (or conceptual explanation) and application. Also, avoid introducing terms and concepts in an ad-hoc fashion. If you’re going to talk about something, always mention it beforehand. Cheers

Oliver Frolovs on July 8, 2022

I think I finally understood the bewildering landscape of environment isolation and dependency management tools in Python. Thank you!

cjf1994 on Aug. 25, 2022

This was a good overview. I’m new to Python and this course made Pip way less confusing!

paulfwatts on Dec. 14, 2022

A great refresher and picked up many useful tips.

Thank you for the course!

pocsgeza on Sept. 22, 2023

It was good short course BUT it had a bit of clickbait.

It showed in the beginning a scenario where the installation of a package is successful but import is still not possible. I think this part was not covered in enough detail.

One of the issues I personally keep getting stuck on is installing packages locally so they can be imported in to tests that in different folders (code in src folder and test in tests folder.

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