Find which version of package is installed with pip

Question

Using pip, is it possible to figure out which version of a package is currently installed?

I know about pip install XYZ --upgrade but I am wondering if there is anything like pip info XYZ. If not what would be the best way to tell what version I am currently using.

2 revs · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-21 03:06:43Z

1742

As of pip 1.3, there is a pip show command.

$ pip show Jinja2 --- Name: Jinja2 Version: 2.7.3 Location: /path/to/virtualenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages Requires: markupsafe

In older versions, pip freeze and grep should do the job nicely.

$ pip freeze | grep Jinja2 Jinja2==2.7.3

edited Aug 21, 2014 at 3:06

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2 revs
AdamKG

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7 Comments

Hugo Over a year ago

@techtonik: It's for freezing current modules to a requirements.txt.

AdamKG Over a year ago

The naming of 'freeze' is historical - it dates back to at least 2008. At the time, many people were already familiar with "freezing" ruby gems, so pip borrowed the then-widely-used name.

Marc Maxmeister Over a year ago

this was not obvious nor documented, but you can type pip show pip to get pip's version info, rather than pip --version as I would've expected.

spookylukey Over a year ago

pip freeze has the advantage that it shows editable VCS checkout versions correctly, while pip show does not.

Vitali Avagyan Over a year ago

I would suggest calling with -i flag as you sometimes do not know which ones are capital letters and which ones are not: pip freeze | grep -i xyz

|

Bengineer · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-24 14:28:43Z

I just sent a pull request in pip with the enhancement Hugo Tavares said:

(specloud as example)

$ pip show specloud Package: specloud Version: 0.4.4 Requires: nose figleaf pinocchio

RickyA · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-16 13:04:40Z

67

Pip 1.3 now also has a list command:

$ pip list argparse (1.2.1) pip (1.5.1) setuptools (2.1) wsgiref (0.1.2)

edited Oct 16, 2014 at 13:04

answered Jan 23, 2014 at 10:36

RickyA

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2 Comments

variable Over a year ago

Say package name is X. To find the version - What is the difference between using pip list and doing import X and then X.__version__? Are both the package versions?

RickyA Over a year ago

both are valid, but pip list is generic, and __version__ is not. I have also seen version() and get_version() for the imported one.

KevinS · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-30 11:00:48Z

and with --outdated as an extra argument, you will get the Current and Latest versions of the packages you are using :

$ pip list --outdated distribute (Current: 0.6.34 Latest: 0.7.3) django-bootstrap3 (Current: 1.1.0 Latest: 4.3.0) Django (Current: 1.5.4 Latest: 1.6.4) Jinja2 (Current: 2.6 Latest: 2.8)

So combining with AdamKG 's answer :

$ pip list --outdated | grep Jinja2 Jinja2 (Current: 2.6 Latest: 2.8)

Check pip-tools too : https://github.com/nvie/pip-tools

An interesting option. I'd rather have it list all of them, and let me know if any of them are outdated, though.

Asclepius · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-02 16:18:18Z

The python function returning just the package version in a machine-readable format:

from importlib.metadata import version version('numpy')

Prior to python 3.8:

pip install importlib-metadata from importlib_metadata import version version('numpy')

The bash equivalent (here also invoked from python) would be much more complex (but more robust - see caution below):

import subprocess def get_installed_ver(pkg_name): bash_str="pip freeze | grep -w %s= | awk -F '==' {'print $2'} | tr -d '\n'" %(pkg_name) return(subprocess.check_output(bash_str, shell=True).decode())

Sample usage:

# pkg_name="xgboost" # pkg_name="Flask" # pkg_name="Flask-Caching" pkg_name="scikit-learn" print(get_installed_ver(pkg_name)) >>> 0.22

Note that in both cases pkg_name parameter should contain package name in the format as returned by pip freeze and not as used during import, e.g. scikit-learn not sklearn or Flask-Caching, not flask_caching.

Note that while invoking pip freeze in bash version may seem inefficient, only this method proves to be sufficiently robust to package naming peculiarities and inconsistencies (e.g. underscores vs dashes, small vs large caps, and abbreviations such as sklearn vs scikit-learn).

Caution: in complex environments both variants can return surprise version numbers, inconsistent with what you can actually get during import.

One such problem arises when there are other versions of the package hidden in a user site-packages subfolder. As an illustration of the perils of using version() here's a situation I encountered:

$ pip freeze | grep lightgbm lightgbm==2.3.1 and $ python -c "import lightgbm; print(lightgbm.__version__)" 2.3.1 vs. $ python -c "from importlib_metadata import version; print(version(\"lightgbm\"))" 2.2.3 until you delete the subfolder with the old version (here 2.2.3) from the user folder (only one would normally be preserved by `pip` - the one installed as last with the `--user` switch): $ ls /home/jovyan/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/lightgbm* /home/jovyan/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/lightgbm-2.2.3.dist-info /home/jovyan/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/lightgbm-2.3.1.dist-info

Another problem is having some conda-installed packages in the same environment. If they share dependencies with your pip-installed packages, and versions of these dependencies differ, you may get downgrades of your pip-installed dependencies.

To illustrate, the latest version of numpy available in PyPI on 04-01-2020 was 1.18.0, while at the same time Anaconda's conda-forge channel had only 1.17.3 version on numpy as their latest. So when you installed a basemap package with conda (as second), your previously pip-installed numpy would get downgraded by conda to 1.17.3, and version 1.18.0 would become unavailable to the import function. In this case version() would be right, and pip freeze/conda list wrong:

$ python -c "from importlib_metadata import version; print(version(\"numpy\"))" 1.17.3 $ python -c "import numpy; print(numpy.__version__)" 1.17.3 $ pip freeze | grep numpy numpy==1.18.0 $ conda list | grep numpy numpy 1.18.0 pypi_0 pypi

Why not use importlib.metadata.version('NameOfProject')? docs.python.org/3/library/…
Great find @sinoroc! I think you should post it as an answer, and I will delete my rather overengineered one:) Sample PoC: from importlib_metadata import version; version('Flask-Caching')
Your newest edits surprise me. Could you try python -c "import pkg_resources; print(pkg_resources.get_distribution('lightgbm').version)"?
That one gives you the correct answer - the latest version installed (2.3.1), when version() still returns the earliest (oldest) one (2.2.3). You can replicate this result by installing both versions with the --user switch, but preserving manually the lightgbm-2.2.3.dist-info folder, to have both of them together, as listed above (pip would normally remove it - until it doesn't).

sinoroc · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-06 11:03:16Z

pip show works in python 3.7:

pip show selenium Name: selenium Version: 4.0.0a3 Summary: Python bindings for Selenium Home-page: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/ Author: UNKNOWN Author-email: UNKNOWN License: Apache 2.0 Location: c:\python3.7\lib\site-packages\selenium-4.0.0a3-py3.7.egg Requires: urllib3 Required-by:

Rajiv · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-06 18:52:46Z

You can use the grep command to find out.

pip show <package_name>|grep Version

Example:

pip show urllib3|grep Version

will show only the versions.

Metadata-Version: 2.0
Version: 1.12

grep is for Unix, the Windows equivalent is findstr (See @Quinn's answer)

Gustavo · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-18 18:30:37Z

You can also install yolk and then run yolk -l which also gives some nice output. Here is what I get for my little virtualenv:

(venv)CWD> /space/vhosts/pyramid.xcode.com/venv/build/unittest project@pyramid 43> yolk -l Chameleon - 2.8.2 - active Jinja2 - 2.6 - active Mako - 0.7.0 - active MarkupSafe - 0.15 - active PasteDeploy - 1.5.0 - active Pygments - 1.5 - active Python - 2.7.3 - active development (/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload) SQLAlchemy - 0.7.6 - active WebOb - 1.2b3 - active account - 0.0 - active development (/space/vhosts/pyramid.xcode.com/project/account) distribute - 0.6.19 - active egenix-mx-base - 3.2.3 - active ipython - 0.12 - active logilab-astng - 0.23.1 - active logilab-common - 0.57.1 - active nose - 1.1.2 - active pbkdf2 - 1.3 - active pip - 1.0.2 - active pyScss - 1.1.3 - active pycrypto - 2.5 - active pylint - 0.25.1 - active pyramid-debugtoolbar - 1.0.1 - active pyramid-tm - 0.4 - active pyramid - 1.3 - active repoze.lru - 0.5 - active simplejson - 2.5.0 - active transaction - 1.2.0 - active translationstring - 1.1 - active venusian - 1.0a3 - active waitress - 0.8.1 - active wsgiref - 0.1.2 - active development (/usr/lib/python2.7) yolk - 0.4.3 - active zope.deprecation - 3.5.1 - active zope.interface - 3.8.0 - active zope.sqlalchemy - 0.7 - active

Romain · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-13 15:34:48Z

pip list can also be told to format its output as json. It could be a safer approach to parse the version.

pip list --no-index --format=json | \ jq -r '.[] | select(.name=="Jinja2").version' # 2.10.1

First time I've heard about the JSON output. Thanks, @Romain!

Ola Tuvesson · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-19 03:11:33Z

12

There's also a tool called pip-check which gives you a quick overview of all installed packages and their update status:

Haven't used it myself; just stumbled upon it and this SO question in quick succession, and since it wasn't mentioned...

answered Feb 19, 2019 at 3:11

Ola Tuvesson

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2 Comments

vela Over a year ago

How to run this on windows

Ola Tuvesson Over a year ago

@vela I expect it would work exactly the same on Windows. Of course you would have to install it first, as you would on any system.

HamZa · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-21 10:16:05Z

10

The easiest way is this:

import jinja2 print jinja2.__version__

edited Aug 21, 2016 at 10:16

HamZa

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answered Dec 30, 2015 at 9:27

user5730083

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3 Comments

spookylukey Over a year ago

This only works for packages that have defined __version__ in their source code. Many packages do not.

variable Over a year ago

Is it good practice to include this version while packaging or it is good practice to only have the version in the setup.py file version parameter?

mirekphd Over a year ago

This method is also not robust to package naming inconsistencies (there are at least 3 types) between the expected input of import and the output of pip freeze.

Quinn · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-24 05:52:35Z

On windows, you can issue command such as:

pip show setuptools | findstr "Version"

Output:

Version: 34.1.1

Asclepius · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-02 16:06:39Z

To do this using Python code:

Using `importlib.metadata.version`

Python ≥3.8

import importlib.metadata importlib.metadata.version('beautifulsoup4') '4.9.1'

Python ≤3.7

(using importlib_metadata.version)

!pip install importlib-metadata import importlib_metadata importlib_metadata.version('beautifulsoup4') '4.9.1'

Using `pkg_resources.Distribution`

import pkg_resources pkg_resources.get_distribution('beautifulsoup4').version '4.9.1' pkg_resources.get_distribution('beautifulsoup4').parsed_version <Version('4.9.1')>

Credited to comments by sinoroc and mirekphd.

4b0 · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-22 06:13:22Z

For Windows you can

open cmd and type python, press enter.
type the import and press enter.
type ._version__ and press enter.

As you can see in screen shot here I am using this method for checking the version of serial module.

Gangula · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-04 13:26:30Z

Since windows doesn't natively support grep, you can use similar pipe: findstr

pip freeze | finsdtr numpy

Sample output

numpy==2.2.6

Ashwani Singh · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-14 12:32:17Z

In question, it is not mentioned which OS user is using (Windows/Linux/Mac)

As there are couple of answers which will work flawlessly on Mac and Linux.

Below command can be used in case the user is trying to find the version of a python package on windows.

In PowerShell use below command :

pip list | findstr <PackageName>

Example:- pip list | findstr requests

Output : requests 2.18.4

Syenix · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-06 20:59:44Z

import pkg_resources packages = [dist.project_name for dist in pkg_resources.working_set] try: for count, item in enumerate(packages): print(item, pkg_resources.get_distribution(item).version) except: pass here

The indentations might not be perfect. The reason I am using a Try- Except block is that few library names will throw errors because of parsing the library names to process the versions. even though packages variable will contain all the libraries install in your environment.

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