Types of Packages
Egg vs Wheel vs Neither. What's meant by neither is that a python package can be installed from its "source" without being packaged as an egg or wheel.
Packaging Utilities
There are several libraries which provide utilities for packaging python applications, including distutils and setuptools. There is already an excellent post on this.
easy_install
Part of setuptools, allows building and installing python packages. Often discouraged in favor of Pip. Designed to make installation of packages easy, doing the chore of downloading and moving them to the correct place for you (hence the name).
Pip
A package manager for python packages, and a replacement for easy_install! See here for some reasons why people prefer it over easy_install. Can do neat things like install a package directly from a git repository or compile C extensions on the target machine. The latter is debatable as to whether or not it's desirable, but nonetheless it's a nice feature to have if you want it.
PyPI
The python package index, where easy_install and Pip search for available packages, by default. Basically a giant online repository of modules that are accepted by the community.
virtualenv
A way of hacking your environment variables to "isolate" an installation of python and it's related modules. Prefers Pip, because Ian Bicking wrote them both. Basically, you use pip to install virtualenv system wide, which then allows you to create python virtual environments, each with their own copy of python, pip, and assorted modules. This lets you have multiple versions of python or install a module just for testing, without mucking up your system-wide python install.
virtualenvwrapper
A really handy shell script that makes creating and tearing down virtual environments easier.
site-packages
One of the supported locations for installing python modules into. Lives someplace like /usr/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages. There are other supported locations, like dist-packages or user specific locations.
What does all this mean for you?
I'd recommend you don't pay any attention to easy_install and just use pip. Please also always use virtualenv. Usually, the only python modules you should install system-wide on your workstation are pip and virtualenv. I've completely ignored eggs and wheels, but if you plan to distribute packages professionally or host them on PyPI, you probably want to investigate those. Also, if you are creating python packages, you will need to learn to write a setup script, with setuptools. My recommendation is to never use distutils.
Some more Reading
A page on python.org about packaging which covers a lot of these topics
Python packaging is a nightmare
A great post that goes against the most common recommendations, including mine!
pip - How to do Python package management? - Stack Overflow
What's the best package manager for python in your opinion?
2024 Python package manager overview - Packaging - Discussions on Python.org
Which package manager do you use?
Videos
Types of Packages
Egg vs Wheel vs Neither. What's meant by neither is that a python package can be installed from its "source" without being packaged as an egg or wheel.
Packaging Utilities
There are several libraries which provide utilities for packaging python applications, including distutils and setuptools. There is already an excellent post on this.
easy_install
Part of setuptools, allows building and installing python packages. Often discouraged in favor of Pip. Designed to make installation of packages easy, doing the chore of downloading and moving them to the correct place for you (hence the name).
Pip
A package manager for python packages, and a replacement for easy_install! See here for some reasons why people prefer it over easy_install. Can do neat things like install a package directly from a git repository or compile C extensions on the target machine. The latter is debatable as to whether or not it's desirable, but nonetheless it's a nice feature to have if you want it.
PyPI
The python package index, where easy_install and Pip search for available packages, by default. Basically a giant online repository of modules that are accepted by the community.
virtualenv
A way of hacking your environment variables to "isolate" an installation of python and it's related modules. Prefers Pip, because Ian Bicking wrote them both. Basically, you use pip to install virtualenv system wide, which then allows you to create python virtual environments, each with their own copy of python, pip, and assorted modules. This lets you have multiple versions of python or install a module just for testing, without mucking up your system-wide python install.
virtualenvwrapper
A really handy shell script that makes creating and tearing down virtual environments easier.
site-packages
One of the supported locations for installing python modules into. Lives someplace like /usr/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages. There are other supported locations, like dist-packages or user specific locations.
What does all this mean for you?
I'd recommend you don't pay any attention to easy_install and just use pip. Please also always use virtualenv. Usually, the only python modules you should install system-wide on your workstation are pip and virtualenv. I've completely ignored eggs and wheels, but if you plan to distribute packages professionally or host them on PyPI, you probably want to investigate those. Also, if you are creating python packages, you will need to learn to write a setup script, with setuptools. My recommendation is to never use distutils.
Some more Reading
A page on python.org about packaging which covers a lot of these topics
Python packaging is a nightmare
A great post that goes against the most common recommendations, including mine!
There's some mixing in the options you are listing:
- virtualenv - is used to create isolated environments
site-packages - standard location where python packages / libs reside
pypi - is a repository
easy_install - is found on the setuptools package
- pip - was written to improve easy_install.
about python eggs
Mine is personally uv because it's so fast and I like the way it formats everything as a package. But to be fair, I haven't really tried out any other package managers.
there are 3 popular package managers for python modules being used the most frequently: conda pip apt(for debian-based linux).
I initially installed anaconda which gave me conda but together with a lot of extra package bloat I may never use.
So naturally I tried miniconda. It turns out there are caveats to this too:
conda-forge is touted as a robust channel but when i tried installing all my most used packages from the conda-forge channel here is what I got:
python3.10 as of writingpandas1.3.4 (latest)scikit-learn(latest)jupyterlab(no problem)matplotlib(CANNOT INSTALL. dependency conflict with python version on conda-forge)requests(CANNOT INSTALL. dependency conflict with python version on conda-forge)
I tried conda package manager with the defaults channel:
all the packages install but
pythonfrom defaults channel is 3.9.7. Everything works with this but no python==3.10.
When I made a separate virtual environment and tried installing via pip package manager only:
everything worked.
python--version is 3.10. every package installed to the latest version EXCEPTscikit-learnwhich is not installing for some reason.
And then there's apt which manages all other non-python packages on my linux and has a few python packages on ubuntu's repositories. But apt does not install packages in virtual environment and may not contain as many packages as pip or conda.
it appears conda with defaults channel is the most robust of all. I don't want to use multiple package managers as it is a hassle when updating and may lead to dependency hell. I want to know which package managers are being used the most considering they are hassle-free and easy to update and keep track of.
So what package manager do you use?