Why use pip over easy_install? [closed]

Answer 1

REQUIREMENTS files.

Seriously, I use this in conjunction with virtualenv every day.

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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 > 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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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 <package> to install binary packages to avoid building a binary

• you can use pip uninstall <package> 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.