PIP is a package manager for Python packages, or modules. If you are familiar with Node.js, PIP is to Python what NPM is to JavaScript.

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1. What is PIP?

PIP stands for “Pip Installs Packages”. It is a command-line utility that allows you to install, reinstall, or uninstall PyPI (Python Package Index) packages with a simple command.

A package contains all the files you need for a module. Modules are Python code libraries you can include in your project.

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2. Install PIP

If you have Python version 3.4 or later installed, PIP is included by default.

To check if PIP is already installed, open your command line or terminal and type:

pip --version

If it returns a version number, you are good to go!

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3. Install packages (pip install)

Downloading a package is very easy. Open your command line interface and tell PIP to download the package you want.

Let’s install the popular requests package, which is used for making HTTP requests:

pip install requests

Once installed, you can import the package in your Python script:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')
print(response.status_code)

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4. Uninstall packages

To uninstall a package, use the uninstall command.

pip uninstall requests

PIP will ask you to confirm the removal. Type y and press enter.

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5. List installed packages

You can see all the packages you have installed on your system (or in your virtual environment) by using the list command.

pip list

This will output a table of package names and their current version.

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6. Requirements file

When sharing a project (e.g., uploading to GitHub), you need to tell other developers which packages your project depends on. Instead of listing them manually, you generate a requirements.txt file.

Create requirements.txt (pip freeze)

The freeze command outputs installed packages in a requirements format. You can pipe this output into a file:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Install from requirements.txt

When another developer clones your project, they can install all the required packages at once by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt