How to Install and Use Python Pip on Debian 8

Python Pip Debian Installation Package Introduction

Introduction

Pip (Pip installs packages) is a package management tool used to install and manage programs written in Python. PyPa also recommends the use of Pip for installing and managing packages.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to install Pip on Debian 8 and how to use Pip to install and manage packages.

Installing Pip

Python pip package is available on Debian apt-get package repository. But before we can install pip, we have to install necessary packages to run pip.

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install python-dev build-essential 

Now we can install Pip using the following command:

# sudo apt-get install python-pip

However the pip version included on Debian apt-get can be outdated, we can upgrade pip to the latest version by using the command below.

# pip install --upgrade pip

Basic usage

Now that we have the latest version of pip installed, let's take a look at some commands that we can use to manage packages.

Installing packages using pip is easy, following is the command syntax that is used to install packages using pip.

# pip install <package>

It is also possible to specify an exact or minimum package version using the command syntax below.

# pip install package==1.5
# pip install package>=1.5

Upgrading a package using pip is done by use of the argument --upgrade as we did when upgrading pip to the latest version.

# pip install --upgrade <package>

As much fun can Installing new packages be, we sadly sometimes have to uninstall packages too, we can uninstall packages using the command:

# pip uninstall <package>

More useful usage

Now that we have the basic of pip covered, let's take a look at what other things we can do with pip.

Search

If you ever forget a name of a package or need to look up if a package exists, you can search pip repository by using the following command:

# pip search <search query>

Show

Show is used to finding information such as version, author of a given installed package.

# pip show pytz
---
Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: pytz
Version: 2013.7
Summary: World timezone definitions, modern and historical
Home-page: http://pythonhosted.org/pytz
Author: Stuart Bishop
Author-email: stuart@stuartbishop.net
License: MIT

List

We can also list all installed python packages including editable by using the following command. Packages are listed in a case-insensitive sorted order.

# pip list

Conclusion

Most python modules are available on pip and pip simplifies the process of installing and managing python modules. Pip is a very useful package management program that every python developer needs to and should know how to use.

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Last updated on
Aug 19, 2015

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