pipim: PIP IMproved

Drop-in replacement for pip with behavior that imitates other popular languages packages managers.

Rationale

When you work on Python projects, you often find yourself creating virtual environments yourself, and having to manually activate them or install dependencies in them.

This is not something you typically do with other languages, where the package manager is smart enough to know if you meant to install packages at the user level or at the project level.

This is more or less in line with the Zen of Python: explicit is better than implicit. However I grew tired of having this behavior available everywhere except with Python, so I decided to write a simple wrapper around pip that will use virtual environments by default, unless --user is passed.

Features

By default, pipim will be installed as pipim, however, you can use it as a drop-in replacement of pip, and the following examples assume you did.

Automatic use of virtual environments

The following commands will automatically create a virtual environment called .venv/ if one does not exist already, and then the actual commands inside of it:

pip install package1 [package2...]

pip uninstall package1 [package2...]

If you wish to work outside of a virtual environment, you can use the --user flag. This will try to use pipus if it is found in your PATH, and will resort to regular pip otherwise.

Install packages from requirements.txt

If you do not specify any package, this will run pip install -r requirements.txt in the virtual environment. As with other install commands, this will create the venv first if it does not exist already.

Simply run:

pip
# or
pip install

Easily installs itself as a replacement

You can use pipim replace-pip once to create a simple script in ~/.local/bin/pip that will invoke pipim instead of pip. This will allow you to forget about pipim and just run pip like you always did before, except that now it comes with extra perks ✨✨.

Run a command inside the virtual environment

pip run <command> [arguments...]

The first argument will be invoked from .venv/bin/, everything that follows is passed to it. For example:

pip run flask --help

Always fallback to regular pip

Every unmatched flags are passed down to pip, any unrecognized command will run pip too.

Contributing

Noticed a bug? Want to request a feature? Simply open a new Issue.