Managing installed packages

The pip tool can do more than just installing packages. It can also give us the following:

• A list of currently installed packages using the -m pip list command:

• Upgrade currently installed packages to the newest version using the -m pip install --upgrade command:

• Uninstall packages that we don't need anymore using the -m pip uninstall command. For example, if we want to uninstall the banknumber package, we can do it by using the following command, shown in this screenshot:

In short, it's a complete cross-platform management tool for Python packages.

The pip tool has many more great options and command-line switches, but what we've seen so far covers the common situations well. If you want to dig into it further, pip's help command will give you the details. For example, consider the following command:

pip help install  

The preceding command prints out all the information you could possibly want about the pip install option:

So, now that we know how to install third-party packages using pip, how do we go about actually finding packages to install in the first place?