Find outdated/updatable pip packages

pip freeze shows me the packages installed, but how do I check against pypi which ones are outdated?

Solution 1:

Since version 1.3, pip features a new command:

$ pip list --outdated
requests (Current: 1.1.0 Latest: 1.2.0)

See this post for more information.

Solution 2:

Thing is, I never upgrade all packages. I upgrade only what I need, because projects may break.

Because there was no easy way to upgrade package by package and update the requirements.txt file, I wrote pip-upgrader which also updates the versions in your requirements.txt file for the packages chosen (or all packages).

Installation

pip install pip-upgrader

Usage

Activate your virtualenv (important, because it will also install the new versions of upgraded packages in the current virtualenv).

cd into your project directory, then run:

pip-upgrade

Advanced usage

If the requirements are placed in a non-standard location, send them as arguments:

pip-upgrade path/to/requirements.txt

If you already know what package you want to upgrade, simply send them as arguments:

pip-upgrade -p django -p celery -p dateutil

If you need to upgrade to pre-release / post-release version, add --prerelease argument to your command.

Full disclosure: I wrote this package.