Pip: The Python Package Manager

00:00 The recommended package manager for Python is called pip. Now, before I go into a little bit more detail on pip, I want to explain to you first what packages in Python are.

00:10 I am going to use the following definition here. So a package is a bundle of software, to be installed into a Python environment. And typically, this would include things like third party libraries and frameworks.

00:23 And I am sure you’ve heard about some of those, for example, Django would be a popular package in the Python world, and so would be Requests, the HTTP download library.

00:33 And then, there is NumPy, another very popular package that includes tons of different libraries and frameworks for number crunching and data science.

00:42 Time to talk about pip, the Python package manager. Pip comes with any modern Python install, it’s included by default with the rest of the Python standard library and things like the Python interpreter, pip’s main interface is a command line tool, also called pip.

00:59 I am going to show you how to access pip from the command line now. I am in my terminal here, and now I am going to run a quick version check on pip, alright, you can see here that it tells me exactly which version of pip I’ve got installed, and it also tells me where this version of pip lives right now.

01:19 So, here I am running Python 3.6 on macOS and pip tells me that it’s using this install with the Python 3.6 site packages directory. Pip’s command line interface also has a help command.

01:33 Running the help command will show you all of the available subcommands you can use with pip and you are going to learn how to use the most important pip commands here in the course.