Installing python module within code
I need to install a package from PyPi straight within my script.
Maybe there's some module or distutils
(distribute
, pip
etc.) feature which allows me to just execute something like pypi.install('requests')
and requests will be installed into my virtualenv.
Solution 1:
The officially recommended way to install packages from a script is by calling pip's command-line interface via a subprocess. Most other answers presented here are not supported by pip. Furthermore since pip v10, all code has been moved to pip._internal
precisely in order to make it clear to users that programmatic use of pip is not allowed.
Use sys.executable
to ensure that you will call the same pip
associated with the current runtime.
import subprocess
import sys
def install(package):
subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, "-m", "pip", "install", package])
Solution 2:
You can also use something like:
import pip
def install(package):
if hasattr(pip, 'main'):
pip.main(['install', package])
else:
pip._internal.main(['install', package])
# Example
if __name__ == '__main__':
install('argh')
Solution 3:
If you want to use pip
to install required package and import it after installation, you can use this code:
def install_and_import(package):
import importlib
try:
importlib.import_module(package)
except ImportError:
import pip
pip.main(['install', package])
finally:
globals()[package] = importlib.import_module(package)
install_and_import('transliterate')
If you installed a package as a user you can encounter the problem that you cannot just import the package. See How to refresh sys.path? for additional information.