pip-upgrade-all

The pip upgrade-all command pip never shipped.

Upgrades every package installed in the current Python environment to its latest release on PyPI — one package at a time, using pip's own internal machinery.

The pip maintainers decided that environment-wide upgrade management is out of pip's scope. This tool fills that gap.

Install

pip install pip-upgrade-all

Usage

pip-upgrade-all [options]

By default, packages are upgraded one by one without dependency resolution (--no-deps). This avoids the resolver backtracking and version conflicts that come with upgrading everything at once. Use --with-deps to opt into full resolution if you need it.

System-managed packages (those installed by dnf, rpm, apt, etc.) are automatically detected via their INSTALLER metadata and skipped when using --user, so they won't get a duplicate copy in your user site-packages.

Options

Examples

# Upgrade everything (no-deps, fast)
pip-upgrade-all

# Only upgrade pip-installed packages, leave system packages alone
pip-upgrade-all --user

# See what would change without touching anything
pip-upgrade-all --dry-run

# Skip specific packages
pip-upgrade-all --skip websockets --skip urllib3

# Full dependency resolution (slower, may backtrack)
pip-upgrade-all --with-deps

# Use a private index
pip-upgrade-all --index-url https://my.artifactory.example/simple/

Caveats

• --no-deps is the default. This means genuinely new dependencies introduced by an upgraded package won't be installed automatically. If something breaks after upgrading, install the missing dependency manually or re-run with --with-deps.

• Dependency conflicts are ignored by default. Upgrading everything to latest will sometimes leave packages with incompatible version combinations (e.g. package-a requires websockets<16 but you now have websockets 16). These are usually harmless warnings unless you actually use that code path. Use --skip to pin packages you care about.

• System packages are skipped with --user. Without --user, a small hardcoded list of known system packages (dnf, apt, pygobject, etc.) is still skipped as a safety net.

Programmatic API

from pip_upgrade_all.__main__ import upgrade_all

exit_code = upgrade_all(user=True, verbose=True)

License

GPL v3