How to Upgrade All Python Packages with Pip

How to upgrade all Python packages with pip?

There isn't a built-in flag yet. Starting with pip version 22.3, the --outdated and --format=freeze have become mutually exclusive. Use Python, to parse the json output:

pip --disable-pip-version-check list --outdated --format=json | python -c "import json, sys; print('\n'.join([x['name'] for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]))"

If you are using pip<22.3 you can use:

pip list --outdated --format=freeze | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

For older versions of pip:

pip freeze --local | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

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• The grep is to skip editable ("-e") package definitions, as suggested by @jawache. (Yes, you could replace grep+cut with sed or awk or perl or...).

• The -n1 flag for xargs prevents stopping everything if updating one package fails (thanks @andsens).

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Note: there are infinite potential variations for this. I'm trying to keep this answer short and simple, but please do suggest variations in the comments!

How to upgrade all Python packages with pip?

There isn't a built-in flag yet. Starting with pip version 22.3, the --outdated and --format=freeze have become mutually exclusive. Use Python, to parse the json output:

pip --disable-pip-version-check list --outdated --format=json | python -c "import json, sys; print('\n'.join([x['name'] for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]))"

If you are using pip<22.3 you can use:

pip list --outdated --format=freeze | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

For older versions of pip:

pip freeze --local | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

---

• The grep is to skip editable ("-e") package definitions, as suggested by @jawache. (Yes, you could replace grep+cut with sed or awk or perl or...).

• The -n1 flag for xargs prevents stopping everything if updating one package fails (thanks @andsens).

---

Note: there are infinite potential variations for this. I'm trying to keep this answer short and simple, but please do suggest variations in the comments!

How to update/upgrade a package using pip?

The way is

pip install <package_name> --upgrade

or in short

pip install <package_name> -U

Using sudo will ask to enter your root password to confirm the action, but although common, is considered unsafe.

If you do not have a root password (if you are not the admin) you should probably work with virtualenv.

You can also use the user flag to install it on this user only.

pip install <package_name> --upgrade --user

Upgrade python packages from requirements.txt using pip command

No. Your requirements file has been pinned to specific versions. If your requirements are set to that version, you should not be trying to upgrade beyond those versions. If you need to upgrade, then you need to switch to unpinned versions in your requirements file.

Example:

lxml>=2.2.0

This would upgrade lxml to any version newer than 2.2.0

lxml>=2.2.0,<2.3.0

This would upgrade lxml to the most recent version between 2.2.0 and 2.3.0.

How do I update a Python package?

You might want to look into a Python package manager like pip. If you don't want to use a Python package manager, you should be able to download M2Crypto and build/compile/install over the old installation.

upgrade all outdated pip packages discarding failures

I slightly modified the command posted in the duplicate of link.

pip3 list --outdated --format=freeze | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip3 install -U --user

pip3 command to upgrade all packages, that is careful about dependency conflicts?

Upgrading packages in python is never easy due to overlapping (sub)dependencies. There are some tools out there that try and help you manage. At my current job we use pip-tools. And in some projects we use poetry but I'm less happy about it's handling.

For pip-tools you define your top-level packages in requirements.in file, which then resolves the sub(sub-sub)dependencies and outputs them into a requirements.txt file.
The benefit of this is that you only worry about your main packages.
You can still upgrade sub dependencies if so desired.

Long story short; blindly updating all your packages will most likely never work out as intended or expected. Either packages ARE upgraded, but stop working, or they do work but don't work with another package that was updated because they needed a lower version of that package.

My advice would be to start with your main packages and build up from there using one of the tools mentioned. There isn't a silver bullet for this. Dependency hell is a very real thing in python.

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