pip-safe
is the safe and easy pip package manager for command-line apps from PyPi.
pip-safe install lastversion
lastversion linux
Using pip install ...
outside virtualenv can simply break your system.
So many tutorials out there blindly recommend that without any note of having to use virtualenvs,
and so many people do just run that without any knowledge of what a virtualenv is.
If you run an OS which distributes Python packages via yum
, apt
, etc. you will break your
system sooner or later, if you keep using pip
as root or sudo.
You either have to package the Python-based program yourself, or have to use a virtualenv for installing it. Everything else is a risk of breakage.
pip-safe
is here to make it very easy to install command-line apps from PyPi without having to
package anything.
Configure your PATH
to execute stuff from ~/.local/bin
and /usr/local/bin
.
Place export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/bin
in your ~/.bashrc
then run source ~/.bashrc
to apply to current shell.
sudo yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
sudo yum -y install pip-safe
Amazon Linux 2 requires disabling EPEL repository due to its reliance on Python 3.7.
sudo yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
sudo yum --disablerepo=epel install pip-safe
Using pip-safe
command installs a program using Python 3, by default.
If you require running a legacy app using Python 2, run yum install pip2-safe
to install Python 2
support. Then to install a Python 2 app, use pip2-safe install <app>
. You can still use
pip-safe
as usual, for Python 3 apps.
Please do not use these methods if packages for pip-safe
are available!
If you install pip-safe
using this method, you can only install packages for current user,
but this method does not require root.
Ensure ~/.local/bin
is in your PATH
, then:
mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs
python3 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe
~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip install pip-safe
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $HOME/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip-safe $HOME/.local/bin/pip-safe
When pip-safe
is installed system-wide, you can install both system-wide and user packages with it.
Ensure /usr/local/bin
is in your PATH
, then:
mkdir -p /opt/pip-safe
python3 -m venv /opt/pip-safe/pip-safe
/opt/pip-safe/pip-safe/bin/pip install pip-safe
ln -s /opt/pip-safe/pip-safe/bin/pip-safe /usr/local/bin/pip-safe
Safely install and remove PyPi (pip) programs without breaking your system
positional arguments:
<command> Command to run, e.g. install, update, remove or list
package-name
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v, --verbose
-y, --assumeyes
--system Install for all users
--version show program's version number and exit
pip-safe install <name>
To see what's going on under the hood, pass --verbose
flag.
There is limited support for installing directly from Git URLs, e.g.:
pip-safe install git+https://github.com/dvershinin/lastversion.git
By default, programs are installed to ~/.local/bin/<package>
(for current user).
For a system-wide installation, use --system
:
sudo pip-safe install --system lastversion
This installs a package to /opt/pip-safe/<package>
and symlinks its executable to /usr/local/bin
,
so it's still safe :-)
pip-safe remove <name>
pip-safe update <name>
pip-safe list
With pip-safe
, you can easily install command line programs from PyPi,
while not worrying about breaking your system.
it installs each program into its own virtualenv, and symlinks whichever
executables it has over to ~/.local/bin/
It is that easy and I don't know why nobody did this before.
- Only pure Python apps will work absolutely reliably, because others might require system libraries, and we can't decipher what are those
- Tested only with Python 3.6