How to upgrade all Python packages with pip

There isn't a built-in flag yet. Starting with pip version 22.3, the --outdated and --format=freeze have become mutually exclusive. Use Python, to parse the JSON output:

pip --disable-pip-version-check list --outdated --format=json | python -c "import json, sys; print('\n'.join([x['name'] for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]))" | xargs -n1 pip install -U

If you are using pip<22.3 you can use:

pip list --outdated --format=freeze | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

For older versions of pip:

pip freeze --local | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs -n1 pip install -U

• The grep is to skip editable ("-e") package definitions, as suggested by @jawache. (Yes, you could replace grep+cut with sed or awk or perl or...).

• The -n1 flag for xargs prevents stopping everything if updating one package fails (thanks @andsens).

Note: there are infinite potential variations for this. I'm trying to keep this answer short and simple, but please do suggest variations in the comments!

To upgrade all local packages, you can install pip-review:

$ pip install pip-review

After that, you can either upgrade the packages interactively:

$ pip-review --local --interactive

Or automatically:

$ pip-review --local --auto

pip-review is a fork of pip-tools. See pip-tools issue mentioned by @knedlsepp. pip-review package works but pip-tools package no longer works. pip-review is looking for a new maintainer.

pip-review works on Windows since version 0.5.

You can use the following Python code. Unlike pip freeze, this will not print warnings and FIXME errors. For pip < 10.0.1

import pip
from subprocess import call

packages = [dist.project_name for dist in pip.get_installed_distributions()]
call("pip install --upgrade " + ' '.join(packages), shell=True)

For pip >= 10.0.1

import pkg_resources
from subprocess import call

packages = [dist.project_name for dist in pkg_resources.working_set]
call("pip install --upgrade " + ' '.join(packages), shell=True)

The following works on Windows and should be good for others too ($ is whatever directory you're in, in the command prompt. For example, C:/Users/Username).

Do

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Open the text file, replace the == with >=, or have sed do it for you:

$ sed -i 's/==/>=/g' requirements.txt

and execute:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade

If you have a problem with a certain package stalling the upgrade (NumPy sometimes), just go to the directory ($), comment out the name (add a # before it) and run the upgrade again. You can later uncomment that section back. This is also great for copying Python global environments.

Another way:

I also like the pip-review method:

py2
$ pip install pip-review

$ pip-review --local --interactive

py3
$ pip3 install pip-review

$ py -3 -m pip-review --local --interactive

You can select 'a' to upgrade all packages; if one upgrade fails, run it again and it continues at the next one.

Use pipupgrade! ... last release 2019

pip install pipupgrade
pipupgrade --verbose --latest --yes

pipupgrade helps you upgrade your system, local or packages from a requirements.txt file! It also selectively upgrades packages that don't break change.

pipupgrade also ensures to upgrade packages present within multiple Python environments. It is compatible with Python 2.7+, Python 3.4+ and pip 9+, pip 10+, pip 18+, pip 19+.

Note: I'm the author of the tool.

Windows version after consulting the excellent documentation for FOR by Rob van der Woude:

for /F "delims===" %i in ('pip freeze') do pip install --upgrade %i

This option seems to me more straightforward and readable:

pip install -U `pip list --outdated | awk 'NR>2 {print $1}'`

The explanation is that pip list --outdated outputs a list of all the outdated packages in this format:

Package   Version Latest Type
--------- ------- ------ -----
fonttools 3.31.0  3.32.0 wheel
urllib3   1.24    1.24.1 wheel
requests  2.20.0  2.20.1 wheel

In the AWK command, NR>2 skips the first two records (lines) and {print $1} selects the first word of each line (as suggested by SergioAraujo, I removed tail -n +3 since awk can indeed handle skipping records).

The following one-liner might prove of help:

(pip >= 22.3)

as per this readable answer:

pip install -U `pip list --outdated | awk 'NR>2 {print $1}'`

or as per the accepted answer:

pip --disable-pip-version-check list --outdated --format=json |
    python -c "import json, sys; print('\n'.join([x['name'] for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]))" |
    xargs -n1 pip install -U

(pip 20.0 < 22.3)

pip list --format freeze --outdated | sed 's/=.*//g' | xargs -n1 pip install -U

Older Versions:

pip list --format freeze --outdated | sed 's/(.*//g' | xargs -n1 pip install -U

xargs -n1 keeps going if an error occurs.

If you need more "fine grained" control over what is omitted and what raises an error you should not add the -n1 flag and explicitly define the errors to ignore, by "piping" the following line for each separate error:

| sed 's/^<First characters of the error>.*//'

Here is a working example:

pip list --format freeze --outdated | sed 's/=.*//g' | sed 's/^<First characters of the first error>.*//' | sed 's/^<First characters of the second error>.*//' | xargs pip install -U

You can just print the packages that are outdated:

pip freeze | cut -d = -f 1 | xargs -n 1 pip search | grep -B2 'LATEST:'

More Robust Solution

For pip3, use this:

pip3 freeze --local |sed -rn 's/^([^=# \t\\][^ \t=]*)=.*/echo; echo Processing \1 ...; pip3 install -U \1/p' |sh

For pip, just remove the 3s as such:

pip freeze --local |sed -rn 's/^([^=# \t\\][^ \t=]*)=.*/echo; echo Processing \1 ...; pip install -U \1/p' |sh

OS X Oddity

OS X, as of July 2017, ships with a very old version of sed (a dozen years old). To get extended regular expressions, use -E instead of -r in the solution above.

Solving Issues with Popular Solutions

This solution is well designed and tested¹, whereas there are problems with even the most popular solutions.

• Portability issues due to changing pip command line features
• Crashing of xargs because of common pip or pip3 child process failures
• Crowded logging from the raw xargs output
• Relying on a Python-to-OS bridge while potentially upgrading it³

The above command uses the simplest and most portable pip syntax in combination with sed and sh to overcome these issues completely. Details of the sed operation can be scrutinized with the commented version².

Details

[1] Tested and regularly used in a Linux 4.8.16-200.fc24.x86_64 cluster and tested on five other Linux/Unix flavors. It also runs on Cygwin64 installed on Windows 10. Testing on iOS is needed.

[2] To see the anatomy of the command more clearly, this is the exact equivalent of the above pip3 command with comments:

# Match lines from pip's local package list output
# that meet the following three criteria and pass the
# package name to the replacement string in group 1.
# (a) Do not start with invalid characters
# (b) Follow the rule of no white space in the package names
# (c) Immediately follow the package name with an equal sign
sed="s/^([^=# \t\\][^ \t=]*)=.*"

# Separate the output of package upgrades with a blank line
sed="$sed/echo"

# Indicate what package is being processed
sed="$sed; echo Processing \1 ..."

# Perform the upgrade using just the valid package name
sed="$sed; pip3 install -U \1"

# Output the commands
sed="$sed/p"

# Stream edit the list as above
# and pass the commands to a shell
pip3 freeze --local | sed -rn "$sed" | sh

[3] Upgrading a Python or PIP component that is also used in the upgrading of a Python or PIP component can be a potential cause of a deadlock or package database corruption.

I had the same problem with upgrading. Thing is, I never upgrade all packages. I upgrade only what I need, because project may break.

Because there was no easy way for upgrading package by package, and updating the requirements.txt file, I wrote this pip-upgrader which also updates the versions in your requirements.txt file for the packages chosen (or all packages).

Installation

pip install pip-upgrader

Usage

Activate your virtualenv (important, because it will also install the new versions of upgraded packages in current virtualenv).

cd into your project directory, then run:

pip-upgrade

Advanced usage

If the requirements are placed in a non-standard location, send them as arguments:

pip-upgrade path/to/requirements.txt

If you already know what package you want to upgrade, simply send them as arguments:

pip-upgrade -p django -p celery -p dateutil

If you need to upgrade to pre-release / post-release version, add --prerelease argument to your command.

Full disclosure: I wrote this package.

This seems more concise.

pip list --outdated | cut -d ' ' -f1 | xargs -n1 pip install -U

Explanation:

pip list --outdated gets lines like these

urllib3 (1.7.1) - Latest: 1.15.1 [wheel]
wheel (0.24.0) - Latest: 0.29.0 [wheel]

In cut -d ' ' -f1, -d ' ' sets "space" as the delimiter, -f1 means to get the first column.

So the above lines becomes:

urllib3
wheel

Then pass them to xargs to run the command, pip install -U, with each line as appending arguments.

-n1 limits the number of arguments passed to each command pip install -U to be 1.

One-liner version of Ramana's answer.

python -c 'import pip, subprocess; [subprocess.call("pip install -U " + d.project_name, shell=1) for d in pip.get_installed_distributions()]'

From yolk:

pip install -U `yolk -U | awk '{print $1}' | uniq`

However, you need to get yolk first:

sudo pip install -U yolk

The pip_upgrade_outdated (based on this older script) does the job. According to its documentation:

usage: pip_upgrade_outdated [-h] [-3 | -2 | --pip_cmd PIP_CMD]
                            [--serial | --parallel] [--dry_run] [--verbose]
                            [--version]

Upgrade outdated python packages with pip.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -3                 use pip3
  -2                 use pip2
  --pip_cmd PIP_CMD  use PIP_CMD (default pip)
  --serial, -s       upgrade in serial (default)
  --parallel, -p     upgrade in parallel
  --dry_run, -n      get list, but don't upgrade
  --verbose, -v      may be specified multiple times
  --version          show program's version number and exit

Step 1:

pip install pip-upgrade-outdated

Step 2:

pip_upgrade_outdated

When using a virtualenv and if you just want to upgrade packages added to your virtualenv, you may want to do:

pip install `pip freeze -l | cut --fields=1 -d = -` --upgrade

The simplest and fastest solution that I found in the pip issue discussion is:

pip install pipdate
pipdate

Source: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3819

Updating Python packages on Windows or Linux

1. Output a list of installed packages into a requirements file (requirements.txt):

   pip freeze > requirements.txt
   

2. Edit requirements.txt, and replace all ‘==’ with ‘>=’. Use the ‘Replace All’ command in the editor.

3. Upgrade all outdated packages

   pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade
   

Source: How to Update All Python Packages

Windows PowerShell solution

pip freeze | %{$_.split('==')[0]} | %{pip install --upgrade $_}

Use AWK update packages:

pip install -U $(pip freeze | awk -F'[=]' '{print $1}')

Windows PowerShell update

foreach($p in $(pip freeze)){ pip install -U $p.Split("=")[0]}

One line in PowerShell 5.1 with administrator rights, Python 3.6.5, and pip version 10.0.1:

pip list -o --format json | ConvertFrom-Json | foreach {pip install $_.name -U --no-warn-script-location}

It works smoothly if there are no broken packages or special wheels in the list...

If you have pip<22.3 installed, a pure Bash/Z shell one-liner for achieving that:

for p in $(pip list -o --format freeze); do pip install -U ${p%%=*}; done

Or, in a nicely-formatted way:

for p in $(pip list -o --format freeze)
do
    pip install -U ${p%%=*}
done

After this you will have pip>=22.3 in which -o and --format freeze are mutually exclusive, and you can no longer use this one-liner.

The rather amazing yolk makes this easy.

pip install yolk3k # Don't install `yolk`, see https://github.com/cakebread/yolk/issues/35
yolk --upgrade

For more information on yolk: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/yolk/0.4.3

It can do lots of things you'll probably find useful.

You can try this:

for i in `pip list | awk -F ' ' '{print $1}'`; do pip install --upgrade $i; done

The shortest and easiest on Windows.

pip freeze > requirements.txt && pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt && rm requirements.txt

Use:

pip install -r <(pip freeze) --upgrade

There is not necessary to be so troublesome or install some package.

Update pip packages on Linux shell:

pip list --outdated --format=freeze | awk -F"==" '{print $1}' | xargs -i pip install -U {}

Update pip packages on Windows powershell:

pip list --outdated --format=freeze | ForEach { pip install -U $_.split("==")[0] }

Some points:

• Replace pip as your python version to pip3 or pip2.
• pip list --outdated to check outdated pip packages.
• --format on my pip version 22.0.3 only has 3 types: columns (default), freeze, or json. freeze is better option in command pipes.
• Keep command simple and usable as many systems as possible.

Ramana's answer worked the best for me, of those here, but I had to add a few catches:

import pip
for dist in pip.get_installed_distributions():
    if 'site-packages' in dist.location:
        try:
            pip.call_subprocess(['pip', 'install', '-U', dist.key])
        except Exception, exc:
            print exc

The site-packages check excludes my development packages, because they are not located in the system site-packages directory. The try-except simply skips packages that have been removed from PyPI.

To endolith: I was hoping for an easy pip.install(dist.key, upgrade=True), too, but it doesn't look like pip was meant to be used by anything but the command line (the docs don't mention the internal API, and the pip developers didn't use docstrings).

This ought to be more effective:

pip3 list -o | grep -v -i warning | cut -f1 -d' ' | tr " " "\n" | awk '{if(NR>=3)print}' | cut -d' ' -f1 | xargs -n1 pip3 install -U

1. pip list -o lists outdated packages;
2. grep -v -i warning inverted match on warning to avoid errors when updating
3. cut -f1 -d1' ' returns the first word - the name of the outdated package;
4. tr "\n|\r" " " converts the multiline result from cut into a single-line, space-separated list;
5. awk '{if(NR>=3)print}' skips header lines
6. cut -d' ' -f1 fetches the first column
7. xargs -n1 pip install -U takes 1 argument from the pipe left of it, and passes it to the command to upgrade the list of packages.

Sent through a pull-request to the pip folks; in the meantime use this pip library solution I wrote:

from pip import get_installed_distributions
from pip.commands import install

install_cmd = install.InstallCommand()

options, args = install_cmd.parse_args([package.project_name
                                        for package in
                                        get_installed_distributions()])

options.upgrade = True
install_cmd.run(options, args)  # Chuck this in a try/except and print as wanted