Find all packages installed with easy_install/pip?

Question

Is there a way to find all Python PyPI packages that were installed with easy_install or pip? I mean, excluding everything that was/is installed with the distributions tool

Answer 1

pip.get_installed_distributions() will give a list of installed packages

import pip
from os.path import join

for package in pip.get_installed_distributions():
    print(package.location) # you can exclude packages that's in /usr/XXX
    print(join(package.location, package._get_metadata("top_level.txt"))) # root directory of this package

Answer 2

pip freeze will output a list of installed packages and their versions. It also allows you to write those packages to a file that can later be used to set up a new environment.

https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_freeze/#pip-freeze

Answer 3

pip list [options] You can see the complete reference here

Answer 4

Newer versions of pip have the ability to do what the OP wants via pip list -l or pip freeze -l (--list).
On Debian (at least) the man page doesn't make this clear, and I only discovered it - under the assumption that the feature must exist - with pip list --help.

There are recent comments that suggest this feature is not obvious in either the documentation or the existing answers (although hinted at by some), so I thought I should post. I would have preferred to do so as a comment, but I don't have the reputation points.

Answer 5

As @almenon pointed out, this no longer works and it is not the supported way to get package information in your code. The following raises an exception:

import pip
installed_packages = dict([(package.project_name, package.version) 
                           for package in pip.get_installed_distributions()])

To accomplish this, you can import pkg_resources. Here's an example:

import pkg_resources
installed_packages = dict([(package.project_name, package.version)
                           for package in pkg_resources.working_set])

I'm on v3.6.5

Answer 6

If you use the Anaconda python distribution, you can use the conda list command to see what was installed by what method:

user@pc:~ $ conda list
# packages in environment at /anaconda3:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
_ipyw_jlab_nb_ext_conf    0.1.0            py36h2fc01ae_0
alabaster                 0.7.10           py36h174008c_0
amqp                      2.2.2                     <pip>
anaconda                  5.1.0                    py36_2
anaconda-client           1.6.9                    py36_0

To grab the entries installed by pip (including possibly pip itself):

user@pc:~ $ conda list | grep \<pip
amqp                      2.2.2                     <pip>
astroid                   1.6.2                     <pip>
billiard                  3.5.0.3                   <pip>
blinker                   1.4                       <pip>
ez-setup                  0.9                       <pip>
feedgenerator             1.9                       <pip>

Of course you probably want to just select the first column, which you can do with (excluding pip if needed):

user@pc:~ $ conda list | awk '$3 ~ /pip/ {if ($1 != "pip") print $1}'
amqp        
astroid
billiard
blinker
ez-setup
feedgenerator 

Finally you can grab these values and pip uninstall all of them using the following:

user@pc:~ $ conda list | awk '$3 ~ /pip/ {if ($1 != "pip") print $1}' | xargs pip uninstall -y

Note the use of the -y flag for the pip uninstall to avoid having to give confirmation to delete.