pipdeptree
is a command line utility for displaying the python packages installed in an virtualenv in form of a dependency tree. Since pip freeze
shows all dependencies as a flat list, finding out which are the top level packages and which packages do they depend on requires some effort. It can also be tedious to resolve conflicting dependencies because pip
doesn't yet have true dependency resolution (more on this later). This utility tries to solve these problem.
To some extent, this tool is inspired by lein deps :tree
command of Leiningen.
$ pip install pipdeptree
To give you a brief idea, here is the output of pipdeptree
compared with pip freeze
:
$ pip freeze
Flask==0.10.1
Flask-Script==0.6.6
Jinja2==2.7.2
-e git+git@github.com:naiquevin/lookupy.git@cdbe30c160e1c29802df75e145ea4ad903c05386#egg=Lookupy-master
Mako==0.9.1
MarkupSafe==0.18
SQLAlchemy==0.9.1
Werkzeug==0.9.4
alembic==0.6.2
argparse==1.2.1
ipython==2.0.0
itsdangerous==0.23
psycopg2==2.5.2
redis==2.9.1
slugify==0.0.1
wsgiref==0.1.2
And now see what pipdeptree
outputs,
$ pipdeptree
Warning!!! Possible confusing dependencies found:
* Mako==0.9.1 -> MarkupSafe [required: >=0.9.2, installed: 0.18]
Jinja2==2.7.2 -> MarkupSafe [installed: 0.18]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lookupy==0.1
wsgiref==0.1.2
argparse==1.2.1
psycopg2==2.5.2
Flask-Script==0.6.6
- Flask [installed: 0.10.1]
- Werkzeug [required: >=0.7, installed: 0.9.4]
- Jinja2 [required: >=2.4, installed: 2.7.2]
- MarkupSafe [installed: 0.18]
- itsdangerous [required: >=0.21, installed: 0.23]
alembic==0.6.2
- SQLAlchemy [required: >=0.7.3, installed: 0.9.1]
- Mako [installed: 0.9.1]
- MarkupSafe [required: >=0.9.2, installed: 0.18]
ipython==2.0.0
slugify==0.0.1
redis==2.9.1
As seen in the above output, pipdeptree
by default warns about possible confusing dependencies. Any package that's specified as a dependency of multiple packages with a different version is considered as a possible confusing dependency. This is helpful because pip
doesn't have true dependency resolution yet. The warning is printed to stderr instead of stdout and it can be completely disabled by using the --nowarn
flag.
In case any of the packages have circular dependencies (eg. package A depending upon package B and package B depending upon package A), then pipdeptree
will print warnings about that as well.
$ pipdeptree
Warning!!! Cyclic dependencies found:
- CircularDependencyA => CircularDependencyB => CircularDependencyA
- CircularDependencyB => CircularDependencyA => CircularDependencyB
------------------------------------------------------------------------
wsgiref==0.1.2
argparse==1.2.1
As with the confusing dependencies warnings, these are printed to stderr and can be disabled using the --nowarn
flag.
If you wish to track only the top level packages in your requirements.txt
file, it's possible to do so using pipdeptree
by grep-ing only the top-level lines from the output,
$ pipdeptree | grep -P '^\w+'
Lookupy==0.1
wsgiref==0.1.2
argparse==1.2.1
psycopg2==2.5.2
Flask-Script==0.6.6
alembic==0.6.2
ipython==2.0.0
slugify==0.0.1
redis==2.9.1
There is a problem here though. The output doesn't mention anything about Lookupy
being installed as an editable package (refer to the output of pip freeze
above) and information about it's source is lost. To fix this, pipdeptree
must be run with a -f
or --freeze
flag.
$ pipdeptree -f --nowarn | grep -P '^[\w0-9\-=.]+'
-e git+git@github.com:naiquevin/lookupy.git@cdbe30c160e1c29802df75e145ea4ad903c05386#egg=Lookupy-master
wsgiref==0.1.2
argparse==1.2.1
psycopg2==2.5.2
Flask-Script==0.6.6
alembic==0.6.2
ipython==2.0.0
slugify==0.0.1
redis==2.9.1
$ pipdeptree -f --nowarn | grep -P '^[\w0-9\-=.]+' > requirements.txt
The freeze flag will also not output the hyphens for child dependencies, so you could dump the complete output of pipdeptree -f
to the requirements.txt file making the file human-friendly (due to indentations) as well as pip-friendly. (Take care of duplicate dependencies though)
usage: pipdeptree.py [-h] [-f] [-a] [-l] [-w]
Dependency tree of the installed python packages
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-f, --freeze Print names so as to write freeze files
-a, --all list all deps at top level
-l, --local-only If in a virtualenv that has global access donot show
globally installed packages
-w, --nowarn Inhibit warnings about possibly confusing packages
- To work with packages installed inside a virtualenv, pipdeptree also needs to be installed in the same virtualenv even if it's already installed globally.
- One thing you might have noticed already is that
flask
is shown as a dependency offlask-script
, which although correct, sounds a bit odd.flask-script
is being used here because we are usingflask
and not the other way around. Same withsqlalchemy
andalembic
. I haven't yet thought about a possible solution to this! (May be if libs that are "extensions" could be distinguished from the ones that are "dependencies". Suggestions are welcome.)
Tests can be run against all version of python using tox as follows:
$ make test-tox
This assumes that you have python versions 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 installed on your machine. (See more: tox.ini)
Or if you don't want to install all the versions of python but want to run tests quickly against Python2.7 only:
$ make test
Tests require some virtualenvs to be created, so another assumption is that you have virtualenv
installed.
Before pushing the code or sending pull requests it's recommended to run make test-tox
once so that tests are run on all environments.
(See more: Makefile)
MIT (See LICENSE)