pypi-info

A command-line tool that fetches and displays PyPI package information in a readable, colourful terminal layout (built with rich).

Look up a package, list every version, show dependencies, download a release, search PyPI, or check a whole requirements.txt for packages that exist.

Features

• Package overview: name, version, author, license, Python requirement, project URLs, classifiers, description (rendered as Markdown), recent releases and statistics
• --all-versions: every release with date, file count, size and file types (wheel / sdist)
• --requirements: dependencies grouped into core, optional, dev and test, with version specifiers and environment markers; can export them to a file
• --download: download a wheel (falls back to sdist) with a progress bar, for the latest or a specific version
• --check FILE: check that every package in a requirements file exists on PyPI, with live per-package status and a summary table
• Fuzzy lookup: if a name is not found, pipinfo searches PyPI, guesses common name patterns and lets you pick from a list
• Caching: file cache (default) and optional Redis cache
• Optional PyQt5 GUI

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer (the code uses str | None type hints)
• Required packages:
  • rich
  • rich-argparse
  • envdot (loads the config file / .env)
• Optional packages:
  • redis for the Redis cache
  • richcolorlog for coloured logging (otherwise custom_logging.py must be importable, see below)
  • PyQt5 and Pygments for the GUI (gui_qt5.py must be importable)

Important: --check needs the rich fork

--check uses console.status(..., spinner_position='right', persist='half'). Those two arguments are not in upstream rich. They exist in the author's fork:

https://github.com/cumulus13/rich

With stock rich, -c fails with Console.status() got an unexpected keyword argument 'spinner_position'. All other features work with stock rich.

persist accepts:

Installation

From source:

git clone https://github.com/cumulus13/pipinfo
cd pipinfo
pip install rich rich-argparse envdot
# optional
pip install redis richcolorlog PyQt5 pygments

With pip:

$ pip install pypi-info

If richcolorlog is not installed, the script falls back to custom_logging.get_logger(name, level=...). Provide a custom_logging.py next to the script, for example:

import logging

def get_logger(name, level=logging.CRITICAL):
    return logging.getLogger(name)

Run it as python pipinfo.py ..., or install it as a command named pipinfo.

Usage

pipinfo [options] [package ...]

At least one package or --check FILE is required; otherwise help is shown.

Alias names for pipinfo: pypinfo, pypi-info

Examples

# Full overview
pipinfo requests

# Only the latest release files
pipinfo requests --last

# Every available version
pipinfo django --all-versions

# Dependencies, and export them to requirements.txt
pipinfo celery -r
pipinfo celery -r -e
pipinfo celery -r -e -E celery-deps.txt

# Download latest wheel to ./downloads/requests/
pipinfo requests -d -p downloads

# Download a specific version
pipinfo requests -d -v 2.31.0

# Quick facts
pipinfo rich --author
pipinfo rich --home
pipinfo rich --tags
pipinfo rich --urls

# Search PyPI (also happens automatically if the exact name does not exist)
pipinfo "movie db" --search-only

# Several packages at once
pipinfo rich click typer

# Check a requirements file
pipinfo -c requirements.txt
pipinfo -c requirements.txt --verbose

Options

Checking a requirements file (-c)

pipinfo -c requirements.txt

While running, each package shows a live status line, which is replaced with the result:

❓ check 'requests'
✅ check 'requests' EXIST
❌ check 'not-a-real-pkg' NOT FOUND
⚠️  check 'celery' ERROR HTTP 503 Service Unavailable

When all packages have been checked, a summary table is printed:

              📋 Check Results from requirements.txt
┏━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ # ┃ Package Name   ┃ Status       ┃ Latest Version ┃
┡━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ 1 │ requests       │ ✅ EXIST     │ 2.34.2         │
│ 2 │ not-a-real-pkg │ ❌ NOT FOUND │ -              │
│ 3 │ celery         │ ⚠️  ERROR    │ -              │
└───┴────────────────┴──────────────┴────────────────┘

Result states

Network errors and HTTP 429/500/502/503/504 are retried with a short backoff (--retries, --timeout). Use --verbose to see why a package failed.

How the file is parsed

One requirement per line. Package names are extracted and de-duplicated (case-insensitive). The following are handled or skipped:

• Version specifiers and extras: requests==2.0, rich[extra]>=13, pkg!=1.0
• Environment markers: rich ; python_version > "3"
• Inline comments: flask # web, and full-line comments
• Skipped: option lines (-r other.txt, -e ., --index-url ...), local paths, git+... and http(s):// URLs
• A UTF-8 BOM at the start of the file is tolerated

-r other.txt includes are not followed.

Exit codes (-c without positional packages)

This makes it usable in CI. If you also pass packages on the command line, pipinfo continues with the normal lookup after printing the table.

Lookup, search and fuzzy matching

If the exact name does not exist, pipinfo:

1. searches pypi.org/search and parses the results,
2. tries common name patterns (python-X, X-python, pyX, Xpy, ...),
3. falls back to fuzzy matching against a list of popular packages.

If several candidates are found, an interactive numbered list lets you pick one (0 cancels).

Downloads

• Prefers a wheel, then an sdist, then the first available file.
• Files are saved in <path>/<package-name>/ by default. Set DOWNLOAD_IN_SUBFOLDER=0 to save directly in <path>.
• The DOWNLOAD_PATH environment variable, if set, overrides -p.

Configuration

pipinfo loads its configuration with envdot. The first existing file from the list below is used; if none exists, a .env next to the script is used.

Linux / macOS

~/.pypi_info/.env
~/.config/.pypi_info/.env
~/.config/.env
~/.pypi_info/<script>.{ini,toml,json,yml}
~/.config/.pypi_info/<script>.{ini,toml,json,yml}
~/.config/<script>.{ini,toml,json,yml}

Windows

%APPDATA%\.pypi_info\.env
%USERPROFILE%\.pypi_info\.env
%APPDATA%\.pypi_info\<script>.{ini,toml,json,yml}
%USERPROFILE%\.pypi_info\<script>.{ini,toml,json,yml}

<script> is the script file name without extension (for example pipinfo).

Settings

Boolean values accept 1, true, yes, on (case-insensitive) as true; anything else is false.

Example .env:

USE_CACHE=true
CACHE_EXPIRY=7200
USE_REDIS=true
PYPI_INFO_REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
PYPI_INFO_REDIS_PORT=6379
DOWNLOAD_IN_SUBFOLDER=1

Notes on caching

• The file cache stores package JSON and search pages. Entries older than CACHE_EXPIRY are removed when read.
• Only fresh network results are written back to the cache, so a cache hit does not extend its own lifetime.
• --check always queries PyPI directly and does not read the cache.
• The file cache uses pickle; only point CACHE_DIR at a directory you control.

Troubleshooting

Console.status() got an unexpected keyword argument 'spinner_position' You are using stock rich. Install the fork (see above) to use -c.

A package shows ERROR in --check It could not be checked, it is not necessarily missing. Re-run with --verbose to see the reason, and try a higher --timeout or --retries.

unrecognized arguments: --debug You are running an older version. --debug is registered in current versions.

Output crashes when piped or in CI Older versions called os.get_terminal_size(). Current versions use shutil.get_terminal_size().

GUI does not start Install PyQt5 and pygments, and make sure gui_qt5.py is importable. The reason for the failed import is printed when you pass -g.

Logging import error Without richcolorlog, a custom_logging.py that provides get_logger must be next to the script.

Known limitations

• With several packages, -a, -H and -t print their output for each package but only stop after the last one, so the full overview is also printed for earlier packages. -u stops after the first package.
• --check does not follow -r other.txt includes and ignores URL and path requirements.
• A package name that PyPI normalizes differently is still found (PyPI redirects), but the name shown in the table is the one written in your file.

License

MIT

👤 Author

Hadi Cahyadi

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