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Managing installed packages
The pip tool can do more than just installing packages. It can also give us the following:
- A list of currently installed packages using the -m pip list command:
- Upgrade currently installed packages to the newest version using the -m pip install --upgrade command:
- Uninstall packages that we don't need anymore using the -m pip uninstall command. For example, if we want to uninstall the banknumber package, we can do it by using the following command, shown in this screenshot:
In short, it's a complete cross-platform management tool for Python packages.
Some Python packages require that we be able to compile extensions written in the C programming language to install them, but fortunately that's becoming rare. Normally, if the compiled extension is required, pip will be able to find and install the proper precompiled version automatically. The majority of available packages are pure Python anyhow and don't require compilation.
The pip tool has many more great options and command-line switches, but what we've seen so far covers the common situations well. If you want to dig into it further, pip's help command will give you the details. For example, consider the following command:
pip help install
The preceding command prints out all the information you could possibly want about the pip install option:
So, now that we know how to install third-party packages using pip, how do we go about actually finding packages to install in the first place?