Why use pip over easy install

Question

A tweet reads       Don t use easy install  unless you   like stabbing yourself in the face    Use pip    Why use pip over easy install  Doesn t the fault lie with PyPI and package authors mostly  If an author uploads crap source tarball  eg  missing files  no setup py  to PyPI  then both pip and easy install will fail  Other than cosmetic differences  why do Python people  like in the above tweet  seem to strongly favor pip over easy install    Let s assume that we re talking about easy install from the Distribute package  that is maintained by the community

User · Answer

REQUIREMENTS files   Seriously  I use this in conjunction with virtualenv every day     QUICK DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT TUTORIAL  FOLKS  Requirements files allow you to create a snapshot of all packages that have been installed through pip   By encapsulating those packages in a virtualenvironment  you can have your codebase work off a very specific set of packages and share that codebase with others   From Heroku s documentation https   devcenter heroku com articles python  You create a virtual environment  and set your shell to use it   bash  nix instructions   virtualenv env source env bin activate   Now all python scripts run with this shell will use this environment s packages and configuration   Now you can install a package locally to this environment without needing to install it globally on your machine   pip install flask   Now you can dump the info about which packages are installed with  pip freeze  gt  requirements txt   If you checked that file into version control  when someone else gets your code  they can setup their own virtual environment and install all the dependencies with   pip install -r requirements txt   Any time you can automate tedium like this is awesome

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Many of the answers here are out of date for 2015  although the initially accepted one from Daniel Roseman is not   Here s the current state of things    Binary packages are now distributed as wheels   whl files    not just on PyPI  but in third-party repositories like Christoph Gohlke s Extension Packages for Windows  pip can handle wheels  easy install cannot  Virtual environments  which come built-in with 3 4  or can be added to 2 6  3 1  with virtualenv  have become a very important and prominent tool  and recommended in the official docs   they include pip out of the box  but don t even work properly with easy install  The distribute package that included easy install is no longer maintained  Its improvements over setuptools got merged back into setuptools  Trying to install distribute will just install setuptools instead  easy install itself is only quasi-maintained  All of the cases where pip used to be inferior to easy install   installing from an unpacked source tree  from a DVCS repo  etc    are long-gone  you can pip install    pip install git https     pip comes with the official Python 2 7 and 3 4  packages from python org  and a pip bootstrap is included by default if you build from source  The various incomplete bits of documentation on installing  using  and building packages have been replaced by the Python Packaging User Guide  Python s own documentation on Installing Python Modules now defers to this user guide  and explicitly calls out pip as  the preferred installer program   Other new features have been added to pip over the years that will never be in easy install  For example  pip makes it easy to clone your site-packages by building a requirements file and then installing it with a single command on each side  Or to convert your requirements file to a local repo to use for in-house development  And so on    The only good reason that I know of to use easy install in 2015 is the special case of using Apple s pre-installed Python versions with OS X 10 5-10 8  Since 10 5  Apple has included easy install  but as of 10 10 they still don t include pip  With 10 9   you should still just use get-pip py  but for 10 5-10 8  this has some problems  so it s easier to sudo easy install pip   In general  easy install pip is a bad idea  it s only for OS X 10 5-10 8 that you want to do this   Also  10 5-10 8 include readline in a way that easy install knows how to kludge around but pip doesn t  so you also want to sudo easy install readline if you want to upgrade that

User · Answer

Just met one special case that I had to use easy install instead of pip  or I have to pull the source codes directly   For the package GitPython  the version in pip is too old  which is 0 1 7  while the one from easy install is the latest which is 0 3 2 rc1   I m using Python 2 7 8  I m not sure about the underlay mechanism of easy install and pip  but at least the versions of some packages may be different from each other  and sometimes easy install is the one with newer version   easy install GitPython

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From Ian Bicking s own introduction to pip   pip was originally written to improve on easy install in the following ways  All packages are downloaded before installation  Partially-completed installation doesn   t occur as a result  Care is taken to present useful output on the console  The reasons for actions are kept track of  For instance  if a package is being installed  pip keeps track of why that package was required  Error messages should be useful  The code is relatively concise and cohesive  making it easier to use programmatically  Packages don   t have to be installed as egg archives  they can be installed flat  while keeping the egg metadata   Native support for other version control systems  Git  Mercurial and Bazaar  Uninstallation of packages  Simple to define fixed sets of requirements and reliably reproduce a set of packages

User · Answer

Another   as of yet unmentioned   reason for favoring pip is because it is the new hotness and will continue to be used in the future    The infographic below   from the Current State of Packaging section in the The Hitchhiker s Guide to Packaging v1 0   shows that setuptools easy install will go away in the future     Here s another infographic from distribute s documentation showing that Setuptools and easy install will be replaced by the new hotness   distribute and pip  While pip is still the new hotness  Distribute merged with Setuptools in 2013 with the release of Setuptools v0 7

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UPDATE  setuptools has absorbed distribute as opposed to the other way around  as some thought  setuptools is up-to-date with the latest distutils changes and the wheel format  Hence  easy install and pip are more or less on  equal footing now   Source  http   pythonhosted org setuptools merge-faq html why-setuptools-and-not-distribute-or-another-name

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As an addition to fuzzyman s reply      pip won t install binary packages and isn t well tested on Windows       As Windows doesn t come with a compiler by default pip often can t be   used there  easy install can install binary packages for Windows    Here is a trick on Windows    you can use easy install  lt package gt  to install binary packages to avoid building a binary you can use  pip uninstall  lt package gt  even if you used easy install    This is just a work-around that works for me on windows  Actually I always use pip if no binaries are involved   See the current pip doku  http   www pip-installer org en latest other-tools html pip-compared-to-easy-install     I will ask on the mailing list what is planned for that    Here is the latest update   The new supported way to install binaries is going to be wheel  It is not yet in the standard  but almost  Current version is still an alpha  1 0 0a1  https   pypi python org pypi wheel  http   wheel readthedocs org en latest   I will test wheel by creating an OS X installer for PySide using wheel instead of eggs  Will get back and report about this   cheers - Chris  A quick update   The transition to wheel is almost over  Most packages are supporting wheel   I promised to build wheels for PySide  and I did that last summer  Works great   HINT  A few developers failed so far to support the wheel format  simply because they forget to replace distutils by setuptools  Often  it is easy to convert such packages by replacing this single word in setup py

User · Answer

pip won t install binary packages and isn t well tested on Windows   As Windows doesn t come with a compiler by default pip often can t be used there  easy install can install binary packages for Windows

User · Answer

Two reasons  there may be more    pip provides an uninstall command if an installation fails in the middle  pip will leave you in a clean state

[python] Why use pip over easy_install?

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