Find which version of package is installed with pip

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.

16 Answers

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 

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 

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) 

and with --outdated as an extra argument, you will get the Current and Latest versions of the packages you are using :

$ pip list --outdated distribute (Current: 0.6.34 Latest: 0.7.3) django-bootstrap3 (Current: 1.1.0 Latest: 4.3.0) Django (Current: 1.5.4 Latest: 1.6.4) Jinja2 (Current: 2.6 Latest: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$ pip list --outdated | grep Jinja2 Jinja2 (Current: 2.6 Latest: 2.8) 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

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/ 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/) 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 

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

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 

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...

The easiest way is this:

import jinja2 print jinja2.__version__ 

pip show works in python 3.7:

pip show selenium Name: selenium Version: 4.0.0a3 Summary: Python bindings for Selenium Home-page: 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: 

On windows, you can issue command such as:

pip show setuptools | findstr "Version" 

Output:

Version: 34.1.1 

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.

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 

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

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.

For Windows you can

1. open cmd and type python, press enter.

2. type the import and press enter.

3. 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.