How to List Installed Python Packages

Before beginning this tutorial on getting a list of installed packages (including those located in site-packages, virtual environments, etc), it’s always a good practice to ensure you have an upto-date version of the Python programming language and the latest version of Pip, Anaconda Navigator and Conda in place.

List Installed Packages with Pip

There are a number of pip commands that you can use to get a list of package names and versions, including outdated packages. For example, both pip list and pip freeze will generate a list of installed packages, just with differently formatted results. Keep in mind that pip list will list ALL installed packages (no matter whether they were installed from the Python Package Index or Github, and no matter whether or not they were installed with the pip install command), while pip freeze will list only pip packages (ie., everything installed by whichever pip version you’re using).

For example:

pip list

Output:

Package                             Version
---------------------------------- ----------
absl-py                              0.7.0

pip freeze

Output:

absl-py==0.7.0

List Packages in a Console with Pip

To list all installed packages from a Python console using pip, you can utilize the following script:

>>> import pkg_resources
installed_packages = pkg_resources.working_set
installed_packages_list = sorted(["%s==%s" % (i.key, i.version)
   for i in installed_packages])
print(installed_packages_list)

Output:

['absl-py==0.7.0', 'adodbapi==2.6.0.7', 'alabaster==0.7.12', 'alembic==1.0.7', 'amqp==2.4.1', 'anyjson==0.3.3',

List Modules in a Console without Pip

To list all installed modules from a python console without pip, you can use the following command:

>>> help("modules")

Note that there are some drawbacks to this approach, including:

• If there are a lot of installed packages, this method can take a long time to import each module before it can search that module’s path for sub-modules.
• Python modules that have code outside of an if __name__ == “__main__”: code block, and if user input is expected, may cause the code to enter an infinite loop or hang.

List Installed Packages with Pipenv

The  pipenv lock -r command can be used to generate output from a pipfile.lock file in a pipenv environment. All packages, including dependencies will be listed in the output. For example:

pipenv lock -r

Output:

-i https://pypi.org/simple
certifi==2019.11.28
chardet==3.0.4
idna==2.9
requests==2.23.0
urllib3==1.25.8

List Installed Packages with Anaconda Navigator

To list installed packages in an Anaconda environment using Anaconda Navigator, do the following:

• Start the Anaconda Navigator application.
• Select Environments in the left column.
• A dropdown box at the center-top of the GUI should list installed packages. If not, then select Installed in the dropdown menu to list all packages.

List Installed Packages with Conda

The conda list command can be used to list all packages in a conda environment:

conda list

Output:

# packages in environment at C:\Anaconda2_4.3.1:
#
_license                  1.1 py27_1
alabaster 0.7.9           py27_0

Globally vs Locally Installed Packages

For information about generating a list of installed packages globally vs locally, refer to:

How to List Globally Installed Packages vs Locally Installed Packages in Python

List Installed Packages with the ActiveState Platform

To view a list of installed Python packages in your currently active project using the ActiveState Platform, run the following command on the command line:

state packages

The output is a full list of installed packages in your current project:

matplotlib
numpy
pandas
scikit-learn
scipy

You can also obtain a complete software bill of materials view of all packages, dependencies, transitives dependencies (ie., dependencies of dependencies), OS-level dependencies and shared libraries (ie., OpenSSL) using the ActiveState Platform’s Web GUI:

The ActiveState Platform automatically builds all Python packages including linked C libraries from source code, and packages them for Windows, Linux and macOS. Because it does it all server-side, there’s no need to maintain local build environments.Try it out by signing up for a  free ActiveState Platform account.