How to use Python PIP – with example

How to use Python pip? What is it good for?
How to use Python pip – Installing
How to use Python pip – an alternative method of installing
How to use Python pip – Verifying the installation
How to use Python pip – Upgrading
How to use Python pip – Install libraries
Summary
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How to use Python pip? What is it good for?

Pip – the Package Installer for Python – is a package manager that is used to install and manage software packages and modules found in the Python Package index or any other indexes.

Packages such as the request library are officially packaged and managed while others may have been published by individuals.

Now if you have ever written programs in Python chances are that you have imported a package or library at the top of your program at some point.

Unless the module you have imported into your Python code is built into the standard Python library, it must be downloaded.

Now the best way to do so in Python is by using the PIP package manager.

Common libraries such as the Pandas Library, a common data science library and even bigger frameworks such as Flask and Django can also be installed via the PIP package manager.

How to use Python pip – Installing

Python3 is bundled with the Python package manager, therefore installing python guarantees that the PIP package manager is also installed alongside.

To verify that indeed the pip package manager has been installed in our system we just need to run the command below in the terminal.

pip --version

In the output above it is evident that version 21.2.3 of the pip package manager is installed in the system, furthermore it is linked to Python3.

How to use Python pip – an alternative method of installing

PIP package manager can also be installed from the source by visiting the URL (https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py).

Now copy the contents in this site to another file and save the file as get-pip.py. Proceed to open the windows terminal as the admin and navigate to the file location that we have just saved and run the command below.

python get-pip.py install

This will install the pip package manager in the system and also inform us how to add this into the PATH under the system variable so that we will be able to run the pip package manager from anywhere in the system.

How to use Python pip – Verifying the installation

Once the pip Python package manager has been installed you can easily verify that it has been properly installed by running the command below in the terminal on a Windows operating system.

pip --version

How to use Python pip – Upgrading

Installing a newer version of the pip package manager can be easily done by running the command below in the Python command prompt.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

How to use Python pip – Install libraries

We can use the pip package manager to install the requests library. The request library is the standard library for making HTTP requests in Python.

It can also be installed using the pip package manager by running the command below.

pip install requests

Once we have installed the library, we can now import it at the top of our code and make our requests to the server, interact with services and consume data.

Summary

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