Pipx

pipx is a tool I've been using to solve a few problems of mine...

1. pinning formatting tools like black, flake8, isort, etc. to the same version for all my projects
2. keeping virtual environments clean of things like cookiecutter
3. python utilities I want system wide but not in the global environment, like visidata

What is it?

pip itself is just a package manager like homebrew, apt, etc. But it is tied to a python environment. If you aren't using a virtual environment then pip will operate inside the global installation of python.

Operating within that environment has burned me several times and now I have a strict virtual environment usage policy.

But there are still things I don't want to have to put in every virtual environment - enter pipx

What's it do?

When you pipx install {package} a stand alone virtual environment gets created (by default in ~/.local/pipx/venvs). THen you can install extra dependencies with pipx inject {package} {dependency}

ex. After pipx install visidata in order to open Excel files you need to pipx inject visidata xlrd

In the example with visidata, I can then use it anywhere, in any project, without re-installing with pip in every env.

Also for the formatting tools - I configure vim to run the pipx versions of them on save - this way I don't have to put them in every project's virtual environment!

What about pip?

So obviously you can't pipx everything, nor do you want to. I see it as a safe and better alternative to global package installation.

How can you then be sure that you never pip install into the global env?

Add require-virtualenv = True to your pip.conf and you're good to go!

With that set, if you try to pip install pandas into the global env you'll get a message like this:

~ on  (us-east-1)  NO PYTHON VENV SET
❯ pip install pandas
ERROR: Could not find an activated virtualenv (required).

End

1. Disable your system pip to keep your base python safe
2. Use pipx for tools you want available everywhere or don't have to need in a virtual environment!