Check if Python Package is installed

Question

What\'s a good way to check if a package is installed while within a Python script? I know it\'s easy from the interpreter, but I need to do it within a script.

I g

Answer 1

Updated answer

A better way of doing this is:

import subprocess
import sys

reqs = subprocess.check_output([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'freeze'])
installed_packages = [r.decode().split('==')[0] for r in reqs.split()]

The result:

print(installed_packages)

[
    "Django",
    "six",
    "requests",
]

Check if requests is installed:

if 'requests' in installed_packages:
    # Do something

Why this way? Sometimes you have app name collisions. Importing from the app namespace doesn't give you the full picture of what's installed on the system.

Note, that proposed solution works:

• When using pip to install from PyPI or from any other alternative source (like pip install http://some.site/package-name.zip or any other archive type).
• When installing manually using python setup.py install.
• When installing from system repositories, like sudo apt install python-requests.

Cases when it might not work:

• When installing in development mode, like python setup.py develop.
• When installing in development mode, like pip install -e /path/to/package/source/.

Old answer

A better way of doing this is:

import pip
installed_packages = pip.get_installed_distributions()

For pip>=10.x use:

from pip._internal.utils.misc import get_installed_distributions

Why this way? Sometimes you have app name collisions. Importing from the app namespace doesn't give you the full picture of what's installed on the system.

As a result, you get a list of pkg_resources.Distribution objects. See the following as an example:

print installed_packages
[
    "Django 1.6.4 (/path-to-your-env/lib/python2.7/site-packages)",
    "six 1.6.1 (/path-to-your-env/lib/python2.7/site-packages)",
    "requests 2.5.0 (/path-to-your-env/lib/python2.7/site-packages)",
]

Make a list of it:

flat_installed_packages = [package.project_name for package in installed_packages]

[
    "Django",
    "six",
    "requests",
]

Check if requests is installed:

if 'requests' in flat_installed_packages:
    # Do something