Since pip is a command-line-tool, it does not have an official, supported, importable API.

However, this does not mean that people haven't tried to import pip, usually to end up with much headache when pip's maintainers do routine refactoring.

This project attempts to provide an importable pip API, which is fully compliant with the recommended method of using pip from your program.

Supported Commands

Not all commands are supported in all versions of pip and on all platforms. If the command you are trying to use is not compatible, pip_api will raise a pip_api.exceptions.Incompatible exception for your program to catch.

Available with all pip versions:

• pip_api.version()

  Returns the pip version as a string, e.g. "9.0.1"

• pip_api.installed_distributions()

  Returns a list of all installed distributions as a Distribution object with the following attributes:

  • Distribution.name (string): The name of the installed distribution
  • Distribution.version (packaging.version.Version): The version of the installed distribution
  • Distribution.location (string): The location of the installed distribution
  • Distribution.editable (bool): Whether the distribution is editable or not

• pip_api.parse_requirements(filename, options=None, include_invalid=False)

  Takes a path to a filename of a Requirements file. Returns a mapping from package name to a packaging.requirements.Requirement object with the following attributes:

  • Requirement.name (string): The name of the requirement.
  • Requirement.extras (set): A set of extras that the requirement specifies.
  • Requirement.specifier (packaging.specifiers.SpecifierSet): A SpecifierSet of the version specified by the requirement.
  • Requirement.marker (packaging.markers.Marker): A Marker of the marker for the requirement. Can be None.Optionally takes anoptionsparameter to override the regex used to skip requirements lines. Optionally takes aninclude_invalidparameter to return anUnparsedRequirement` in the event that a requirement cannot be parsed correctly.

Available with pip>=8.0.0:

• pip_api.hash(filename, algorithm='sha256')

  Returns the resulting as a string. Valid algorithm parameters are 'sha256', 'sha384', and 'sha512'