How to get “python -m venv” to directly install latest pip version

Question

As part of the compilation step for a new python version, I fetch and run get-pip.py, to have the latest pip installed next to the python executable:

$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python --version
Python 3.7.0
$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/pip --version
pip 18.0 from /opt/python/3.7.0/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pip (python 3.7)

I have 25 such versions under /opt/python, although I mostly use the five latest versions of each major.minor version that is not EOL. To setup an invironment I used to run virtualenv or my virtualenvutils with the -p /opt/python/X.Y.Z/bin/python option to get a virtual environment with a specific version.

With Python 3.7 this gives the imp module deprecation warning:

$ virtualenv -p /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python /tmp/py37virtualenv
Running virtualenv with interpreter /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python
Using base prefix '/opt/python/3.7.0'
/opt/util/virtualenvutils/lib/python3.6/site-packages/virtualenv.py:1041: DeprecationWarning: the imp module is deprecated in favour of importlib; see the module's documentation for alternative uses
  import imp
New python executable in /tmp/py37virtualenv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.

I have little hope this will be solved in virtualenv, as this has had a PendingDeprecationWarning at least since 2014 (as can be seen from the output in this question)

While investigating replacing virtualenv with python -m venv in virtualenvutils, I first created a new venv based virtual environment by hand:

$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python -m venv /tmp/py37venv
$ /tmp/py37venv/bin/pip --version
pip 10.0.1 from /tmp/py37venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pip (python 3.7)

That has an old pip version! If you use it, you'll get:

You are using pip version 10.0.1, however version 18.0 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command

In the virtual environment created with virtualenv you immediately get the latest version:

$ /tmp/py37virtualenv/bin/pip --version
pip 18.0 from /tmp/py37virtualenv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pip (python 3.7)

I can run a post-creation step:

/tmp/py37venv/bin/pip install -U --disable-pip-version-check pip 

which will take extra time. And if there was a some security update for pip, this would imply running the non-secure version to get a secure version, an ideal point of attack.

From virtualenvutils it is trivial to do the multiple steps to create a pip-less virtualenv and then add pip using get-pip.py. From the command-line this is not so simple:

$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python -m venv --without-pip /tmp/py37venvnopip
$ /tmp/py37venvnopip/bin/python -c "from  urllib.request import urlopen; response = urlopen('https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip'); open('/tmp/tmp_get_pip.py', 'w').write(response.read())"
$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python /tmp/tmp_get_pip.py
......
$ /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/pip --version

pip 18.0 from /opt/python/3.7.0/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pip (python 3.7)

What is causing /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python -m venv to take that old pip version? Is that the version available when 3.7.0 was released?

How can I update my install under /opt/python/3.7.0 in some way so that using /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/python -m venv creates a virtualenv with the latest pip version without reverting to scripts, aliases or using multiple commands? Having the latest pip installed under /opt/python/3.7.0 obviously is not enough.

There are two bundled wheels:

/opt/python/3.7.0/lib/python3.7/ensurepip/_bundled/setuptools-39.0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
/opt/python/3.7.0/lib/python3.7/ensurepip/_bundled/pip-10.0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl

I suspect I need to update those. Is there a better way than updating those by hand? Some option for /some/python -m venv would be nice.

(And running /some/python -m ensurepip --upgrade doesn't do the trick)

---

Running the deprecated /opt/python/3.7.0/bin/pyvenv has the same old pip version problem.

Answer 1

I use upgrade-ensurepip to update those pip and setuptools wheel files that are part of the ensurepip package. It's not as elegant as being able to upgrade ensurepip via pip, but it's still preferable to doing it manually.

https://pypi.org/project/upgrade-ensurepip/

Answer 2

It is an expected behavior. python -m venv calls python -m ensurepip to install pip and This answer shows that ensurepip would only install the bundled version even with --upgrade option. There isn't any official option to update the bundled pip and setuptools.

Well I have also no good idea to fix this problem as it just is the designed behavior. I would like to give two suggestions:

1. Use pipenv. It is really good! And it will be the next-generation official package manager in the future(Although there is a big problem related to current Pypi's structure. In short, a package manager can only decide the dependencies with downloading the whole package. This gives a huge difficulty to building dependencies graph.).

2. Implement your custom EnvBuilder, actually there is an official example about this. And in the example, it also use get-pip.py to install the latest pip.