How to Install PIP on CentOS, Ubuntu and Windows?

pip (or its recursive acronym “Pip Installs Packages”) is the package installer for Python.

Python has an extensive index of available modules and packages that you can use in your projects. Often, downloading them or keeping them updated is a challenge, especially if your project is huge or needs to maintain multiple such projects.

That’s where pip comes in. It can install packages from Python Package Index (PyPI) and other supported indexes listing Python packages.

In this article, we’ll cover installing pip on CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows.

Installing pip

pip is already installed if you are using Python 2 >=2.7.9 or Python 3 >=3.4 downloaded from python.org or if you are working in a Virtual Environment created by virtualenv or venv. You may refer to my previous article about installing Python 3. Make sure to upgrade pip, though.

Use the below command to check whether pip is installed:

CentOS/Ubuntu:

$ python -m pip --version

Windows:

C:\>py -m pip --version

Using Repositories

CentOS:

On CentOS, we can use yum to install pip if it is not pre-installed on the system. First, we need to enable epel-release repository as:

$ sudo yum install epel-release

Then run yum update to update your packages.

$ sudo yum –y update

Once completes, install pip using yum as:

$ sudo yum install python-pip

Ubuntu:

On Ubuntu, if pip is not pre-installed on your system, you can install it using an apt tool as:

$ sudo apt install python-pip

Or for Python 3 as:

$ sudo apt install python3-pip

Windows:

pip comes packaged with Python setup on Windows. If you need to install it separately, follow the next section, which works on all platforms.

Install with get-pip.py

Warning: Be cautious if you are using a Python install managed by your operating system or another package manager. get-pip.py does not coordinate with those tools and may leave your system in an inconsistent state.

To install pip using get-pip.py script, first securely download the script using curl or wget or your favorite download manager as:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

Then execute get-pip.py from the downloaded directory as to install pip:

CentOS/Ubuntu:

$ python get-pip.py

Windows:

C:\>py get-pip.py

Upgrade pip

If required, you can upgrade your pip version using the following commands:

CentOS/Ubuntu:

$ python -m pip install -U pip

Windows:

C:\>py -m pip install -U pip

Downgrade pip

There may be circumstances that you may need to downgrade your pip version to a specific version; you can always do that using:

CentOS/Ubuntu:

$ python -m pip install pip==18.1

Windows:

C:\>py -m pip install pip==18.1

Using pip

Once pip is installed on your system, you can search and install any available Python modules.

To search for any package use:

$ pip search QUERY

For example, if you want to search for NumPy package, use:

$ pip search numpy

To install the NumPy package, use:

$ pip install numpy

If you already have NumPy installed and want to upgrade it, use:

$ pip install --upgrade numpy

This works for any pip supported Python package.

To remove a package, run:

$ pip uninstall <package-name>

Conclusion

You can always get more help and details on supported options by pip with:

$ pip --help

pip documentation and user guide are available from its official site as well. Always working on Python? Check out these impressive Python IDE for productive development.