List Outdated Dependencies with Pip

In the past, if you wanted to review your installed pip packages to see if there are updates available, you either had to use tools like pip-tools or check all of them manually.

But since version 1.3 (released on 2013-03-07), pip supports the checking of dependencies with the new list command. In contrast to pip freeze, the primary idea of the list command is to list and analyze installed packages in a human readable (instead of machine parseable) format.

$ pip freeze
django-unchained==1.0.1
requests==1.1.0
wsgiref==0.1.2

$ pip list
django-unchained (1.0.1)
requests (1.1.0)
wsgiref (0.1.2)

The best thing about the new command is that you can check packages for updates and list only specific packages:

List Options:
  -o, --outdated     List outdated packages (excluding editables)
  -u, --uptodate     List uptodate packages (excluding editables)
  -e, --editable     List editable projects.
  -l, --local        If in a virtualenv that has global access, do not list globally-installed packages.

In summary, you can now show outdated dependencies with a single pip command:

$ pip list --outdated
requests (Current: 1.1.0 Latest: 1.2.0)

Awesome!