Tue Jul 25 2023·2 min read

pip chill not freeze!

Just add direct dependencies to requirements.txt, automatically.

🙏Namaste Pythonistas! Let me ask you something — how do you usually maintain your requirements.txt file? If you’re like me, you must be using good ol’ pip freeze > requirements.txt command. Sure, it’s quick and easy, but have you ever found yourself looking at the file later and wondering what on earth cffi==1.15.1 refers to? Have you struggled to figure out if it was installed directly or as a dependency of another package? The ideal way would be to “hand write” it, but who has the time for it!?

Well, let me tell you about pip-chill. It’s like a smarter version of pip freeze. Instead of simply dumping all installed packages into the requirements file, it shows only the ones you directly installed.

To get started, just install pip-chill using pip itself:

pip install pip-chill

After that here is how I generate the requirements.txt file now:

pip-chill --no-chill -v > requirements.txt

• --no-chill : does not include pip-chill itself in the output
• -v : outputs the indirect dependencies as well, but commented. Therefore it is easy to keep track of them.

It generates the following for a basic Django project.

django==4.2.3  
psycopg2-binary==2.9.6  
requests==2.31.0  
# asgiref==3.7.2 # Installed as dependency for django  
# certifi==2023.5.7 # Installed as dependency for requests  
# charset-normalizer==3.2.0 # Installed as dependency for requests  
# idna==3.4 # Installed as dependency for requests  
# sqlparse==0.4.4 # Installed as dependency for django  
# typing-extensions==4.7.1 # Installed as dependency for asgiref  
# urllib3==2.0.4 # Installed as dependency for requests  
# urllib3==1.26.16 # Installed as dependency for botocore, requests

See how pretty it looks. It just works and solves my problem of properly maintaining requirements.txt. Now, I can focus on coding and building cool stuff, leaving the hassle of maintaining the requirements file to pip-chill.

So just, take a chill pill with pip-chill and chillax!

Happy coding 👋.