How to find great Python packages on PyPI, the Python Package Repository

Key Takeaways

an important part of dependency management is of course the ability to store packages somewhere so that you or other people can install them now let's talk about Python package repositories Python packages are collected in so-called software repositories the biggest or official software repository in python is called pi pi it's also sometimes called the cheese shop because python developers just love their Monty Python references developers can register for a free pie-pie account and then submit new packages to the repository and once a package appears in pie-pie everyone else can install it through pip so this is a really popular method to distribute open-source Python packages and there are literally tens of thousands of packages available for free that you can just install through pip and by the way there's no review or QA process for packages submitted to pi PI so whenever you install a package from pi pi it makes sense to invest some time into due diligence work and reviewing what's available so that you get a quality piece of software let's search for some packages on pi PI we're going to take a look at the pi pi website now and you can find it at pi pi python org let's fire up a browser and then take a look at the pi pi website all right this is pipey eye you can see some stats here so right now there are close to a hundred thousand packages available here on pi pi and when you scroll down you can see sort of a update log off recently updated packages as people push them to the package repository you can see here what was updated and of course one of the most important parts of the site here is the search box so into the search box you can enter keywords and basically do a full-text search on the descriptions and the metadata for the packages available on pi PI so you've probably heard of the really popular requests package which is a HTTP download library so I'm going to go ahead and search for requests here okay so these are the search results for requests and what's interesting here is that the actual requests library that I was looking for is not the number one search result right because this is just doing a search across all of the descriptions and the metadata in all of the available packages so I get some very exhaustive results here and you can see here as I scroll down this is a really long list because obviously the keyword requests seems to be quite popular alright so I'm gonna go ahead and click on the requests library here because every package in pi PI actually has its own landing page so it has its own page on pi PI where the developers can host the readme and give some links to the documentation or release history and stuff like that so what you can see here is that right now I'm looking at the specific version of requests and you can also see that reflected here in the URL so this will be at pi PI slash name of the library slash the version so this is handy if you ever want to link to a specific library or a specific version of library because you can just use that link this is the readme file or the description that the creators of the requests library have put together so the contents of this description here will largely depend on the information that the library creators put in sometimes the formatting as it's displayed on the pi PI website isn't perfect so you're gonna get these super blown-up images here just ignore that for now actually what I wanted to show you is when you scroll all the way down when you scroll all the way down here there will always be the summary with metadata about the package that you're looking at and this is often very useful if you want to find the home page for a specific project or if you want to identify its author or if you're interested in the license that the code is under then also you can see the categories the code is filed under or the library was filed under and also what other dependencies are secondary dependencies that library requires to me the most useful information is usually these top three items here I want to know about the library author I usually take a look at the library homepage and then I also want to know what license the software is under and of course they could also click through these categories here and maybe find some interesting packages that way okay that's it for pi PI you can also search for packages from the command line using the Pips search command usually I would recommend that you stick with the pi pi website though the PIP command doesn't really give you very much information about those search results so it's just the package name and then a very brief description which can be useful but as you've seen in the pi PI demo oftentimes a single keyword can lead to many many search results so it's a little bit hard to untangle that from the command line if you only have limited information available nevertheless that feature exists and it can be useful in a pinch