venv-cmds

Small discovery and maintenance utilities for Python virtual environments.

Why this exists

When you activate a virtual environment it is not always obvious which command-line tools are available or whether they are up to date. venv-cmds provides two commands: list to discover what is installed, and check_updates to check for newer versions on the configured pip index.

Commands

Running venv-cmds with no subcommand is equivalent to venv-cmds list.

list

Show all console_scripts entry points in the active environment.

venv-cmds list
venv-cmds list --details    # include package name alongside each command

check_updates

Check all installed packages against the configured pip index and report which have updates available. Respects all pip index sources configured for the environment — public PyPI, private indexes, and local mirrors all work without any extra configuration.

If pip isn't importable in the current venv (e.g. one created with uv venv without --seed), falls back automatically to uv pip list targeting this same interpreter, provided uv is installed on PATH.

venv-cmds check_updates
venv-cmds check_updates --updates-only            # only show packages with updates
venv-cmds check_updates --no-progress             # suppress status message on stderr (cron-safe)
venv-cmds check_updates --include-install-date    # add an 'Installed on' column
venv-cmds check_updates --timeout 60              # per-package query timeout in seconds (default: 30)
venv-cmds check_updates --output-file updates.txt # write pinned requirements file for updates
venv-cmds check_updates --output-file -           # write pinned requirements to stdout

When --output-file is used the output file contains package==version lines for every package with an available update. Passing this file to pip install -r updates.txt will upgrade exactly the packages that were flagged, with no other changes.

Installation

pip install venv-cmds

Requires Python 3.7 or later. Works with both venv and virtualenv.