pypi-changes

A CLI tool that inspects a Python interpreter's installed packages and compares them against the latest releases on PyPI. It shows which packages are outdated, how long ago each release was published, and highlights major version bumps so you can make informed upgrade decisions.

Getting started

Install from PyPI:

pip install pypi-changes

Run against the current Python interpreter:

pypi-changes

Or point it at a specific interpreter (useful for checking virtual environments):

pypi-changes /path/to/venv/bin/python

How-to guides

Check for outdated packages

Run pypi-changes without arguments to see a tree of all installed packages with their version status. Outdated packages appear in red, with major version bumps in bold red:

$ pypi-changes
🐍 Distributions within /usr/bin/python
├── virtualenv 20.38.0 10 days remote 21.1.0 2 days
├── certifi 2026.1.4 2 months remote 2026.2.25 4 days
├── rich 14.3.3 9 days
├── packaging 26.0 a month
├── urllib3 1.26.20 1 year, 6 months remote 2.6.3 2 months
├── requests 2.32.5 6 months
├── pluggy 1.6.0 10 months
└── covdefaults 2.3.0 2 years

Generate a requirements file for upgrades

Use the requirements output format to produce a requirements.txt-compatible list of outdated packages pinned to their latest versions:

$ pypi-changes --output requirements
virtualenv==21.1.0
certifi==2026.2.25
urllib3==2.6.3
wheel-filename==2.1.0

Pipe directly into pip install to upgrade:

pypi-changes --output requirements > upgrades.txt
pip install -r upgrades.txt

Get machine-readable output

Use JSON output for scripting or integration with other tools:

$ pypi-changes --output json
[
  {
    "name": "virtualenv",
    "version": "20.38.0",
    "up_to_date": false,
    "current": {
      "version": "20.38.0",
      "date": "2026-02-19T07:47:59.778389+00:00",
      "since": "10 days"
    },
    "latest": {
      "version": "21.1.0",
      "date": "2026-02-27T08:49:27.516392+00:00",
      "since": "2 days"
    }
  },
  {
    "name": "rich",
    "version": "14.3.3",
    "up_to_date": true,
    "current": {
      "version": "14.3.3",
      "date": "2026-02-19T17:23:13.732467+00:00",
      "since": "9 days"
    },
    "latest": {
      "version": "14.3.3",
      "date": "2026-02-19T17:23:13.732467+00:00",
      "since": "9 days"
    }
  }
]

Each entry includes name, version, up_to_date, and detailed current/latest release information with dates and human-readable time deltas.

Sort packages alphabetically

By default, packages are sorted by release date (most recently updated first). To sort alphabetically:

pypi-changes --sort alphabetic

Speed up repeated runs with caching

Requests to PyPI are cached in a local SQLite database for 1 hour by default. To adjust the cache duration:

pypi-changes --cache-duration 7200  # cache for 2 hours
pypi-changes --cache-duration 0     # bypass cache entirely
pypi-changes --cache-duration -1    # cache forever

To change the cache file location:

pypi-changes --cache-path /tmp/pypi-cache.sqlite

Use with a private package index

Set the PIP_INDEX_URL environment variable to merge releases from a private index server (e.g. Artifactory) with PyPI data:

PIP_INDEX_URL=https://my-artifactory.example.com/simple pypi-changes

Control request parallelism

PyPI release information is fetched in parallel. Adjust the number of concurrent requests with --jobs:

pypi-changes --jobs 20  # increase parallelism
pypi-changes --jobs 1   # sequential requests

Reference

Usage

pypi-changes [-h] [--jobs COUNT] [--cache-path PATH] [--cache-duration SEC]
             [--sort [{a,alphabetic,u,updated}]] [--output {tree,json,requirements}]
             [PYTHON_EXE]

Positional arguments

Options

Output formats

tree (default) -- a Rich-rendered tree showing each package with its installed version, time since release, and remote version if outdated. Major version bumps appear in bold red; minor/patch bumps in red.

json -- a JSON array where each element contains:

• name -- package name
• version -- installed version
• up_to_date -- boolean
• current -- object with version, date (ISO 8601), and since (human-readable delta)
• latest -- object with the same fields for the newest stable release

requirements -- prints only outdated packages in name==version format, suitable for piping into pip install -r.

Environment variables

How it works

pypi-changes inspects the target Python interpreter's sys.path to discover all installed distributions (packages with .dist-info or .egg-info directories). It then fetches each package's release history from the PyPI JSON API in parallel, using a thread pool controlled by --jobs.

Releases are sorted by semantic version. The latest stable release (excluding dev and pre-releases) is selected for comparison against the installed version. When a release has no uploaded artifacts (common for some yanked or placeholder versions), a synthesized timestamp is generated internally for sorting purposes but is not displayed to the user.

HTTP responses are cached in a local SQLite database via requests-cache to avoid redundant network calls on repeated runs. Expired entries are cleaned up automatically on each invocation.

When PIP_INDEX_URL is set to a non-PyPI URL, pypi-changes also queries that index via the Simple Repository API and merges any versions not found on PyPI into the release list. This is useful for organizations hosting internal packages on private registries.