Indeed. I’ve been wanting to stop using PIP for a long time. It’s not that it’s bad at doing what it does, which it is, but it’s just that I’ve been using it for a long time -I think since I started programming with Python- and it’s time to switch to something more modern, functional and that manages dependencies better.

During these years, we must recognise that Javascript with Node.js has overtaken Python in many aspects. And one of them is dependency management with tools like NPM or Yarn. Some people will say that NPM is a piece of garbage and that dependency management is crazy when there are a lot of packages and versions. And they are right, but doing the same thing with PIP can be crazy. If you want to create your own packages, automate tasks or create custom scripts, Poetry makes it very easy.

Poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in Python. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

Installing Poetry is very simple, it can be done for example using pip install poetry… but as we had agreed to stop using pip, we will use the recommended method:

On Linux and Mac:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python -

Windows:

(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py -UseBasicParsing).Content | python -

It is not necessary to install Poetry every time we have to create a project. It detects the version of Python you have and will create the necessary virtualenvs automatically. Of course we can use it in our projects with Django, Flash, scripts, etc.

For more information, go to the official website. The most basic commands are as follows:

poetry new -> Create new project
poetry shell -> Run shell with Poetry env
poetry init -> Create pyproject.toml file
poetry build -> Create package (.whl y .tar.gz)
poetry publish -> Publish on pypi.org

As I said, I’ve been using it for a few months in all my Python projects. I have even moved some old ones to this system.

Have fun.