Check if a Debian package is installed from Python

Question

Is there an elegant and more Python-like way to check if a package is installed on Debian?

In a bash script, I\'d do:

dpkg -s packagename | grep Stat         


        

Answer 1

Inspired by the previous answers, this works nicely for both Python 2 and Python 3 and avoids try/catch for the key error:

import apt
package = 'foo' # insert your package name here
cache = apt.Cache()
package_installed = False

if package in cache:
    package_installed = cache[package].is_installed