I’m able to update pip-managed packages, but how do I update pip itself? According to pip --version, I currently have pip 1.1 installed in my virtualenv and I want to update to the latest version.

What’s the command for that? Do I need to use distribute or is there a native pip or virtualenv command? I’ve already tried pip update and pip update pip with no success.

pip is just a PyPI package like any other; you could use it to upgrade itself the same way you would upgrade any package:

pip install --upgrade pip

On Windows the recommended command is:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

The more safe method is to run pip though a python module:

python -m pip install -U pip

On windows there seem to be a problem with binaries that try to replace themselves, this method works around that limitation.

In my case my pip version was broken so the update by itself would not work.

Fix:

(inside virtualenv):easy_install -U pip

I tried all of these solutions mentioned above under Debian Jessie. They don’t work, because it just takes the latest version compile by the debian package manager which is 1.5.6 which equates to version 6.0.x. Some packages that use pip as prerequisites will not work as a results, such as spaCy (which needs the option –no-cache-dir to function correctly).

So the actual best way to solve these problems is to run get-pip.py downloaded using wget, from the website or using curl as follows:

 wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -O ./get-pip.py
 python ./get-pip.py
 python3 ./get-pip.py

This will install the current version which at the time of writing this solution is 9.0.1 which is way beyond what Debian provides.

 $ pip --version
 pip 9.0.1 from /home/myhomedir/myvirtualenvdir/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)
 $ pip3 --version
 pip 9.0.1 from /home/myhomedir/myvirtualenvdir/lib/python3.4/site-packages (python 3.4)

Upgrading pip using ‘pip install –upgrade pip‘ does not always work because of the dreaded cert issue: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: [SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] tlsv1 alert protocol version

I like to use the one line command for virtual envs:

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

Or if you want to install it box wide you will need

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | sudo python -

you can give curl a -s flag if you want to silence the output when running in an automation script.

In my case this worked from the terminal command line in Debian Stable

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

To get this to work for me I had to drill down in the Python directory using the Python command prompt (on WIN10 from VS CODE). In my case it was in my “AppData\Local\Programs\Python\python35-32” directory. From there now I ran the command…

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

This worked and I’m good to go.

Open Command Prompt with Administrator Permissions, and repeat the command:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

pip version 10 has an issue. It will manifest as the error:

ubuntu@mymachine-:~/mydir$ sudo pip install --upgrade pip
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    from pip import main
ImportError: cannot import name main

The solution is to be in the venv you want to upgrade and then run:

sudo myvenv/bin/pip install --upgrade pip

rather than just

sudo pip install --upgrade pip

In case you are using venv any update to pip install will result in upgrading the system pip instead of the venv pip. You need to upgrade the pip bootstrapping packages as well.

  python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

I had installed Python in C:\Python\Python36 so I went to the Windows command prompt and typed “cd C:\Python\Python36 to get to the right directory. Then entered the “python -m install –upgrade pip” all good!

On my lap-top with Windows 7 the right way to install latest version of pip is:

python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip

Single Line Python Program
The best way I have found is to write a single line program that downloads and runs the official get-pip script. See below for the code.

The official docs recommend using curl to download the get-pip script, but since I work on windows and don’t have curl installed I prefer using python itself to download and run the script.

Here is the single line program that can be run via the command line using Python 3:

python -c "import urllib.request; exec(urllib.request.urlopen('https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py').read())"

This line gets the official “get-pip.py” script as per the installation notes and executes the script with the “exec” command.

For Python2 you would replace “urllib.request” with “urllib2”:

python -c "import urllib2; exec(urllib2.urlopen('https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py').read())"

Precautions
It’s worth noting that running any python script blindly is inherently dangerous. For this reason, the official instructions recommend downloading the script and inspecting it before running.

That said, many people don’t actually inspect the code and just run it. This one-line program makes that easier.

I had a similar problem on a raspberry pi.

The problem was that http requires SSL and so I needed to force it to use https to get around this requirement.

sudo pip install --upgrade pip --index-url=https://pypi.python.org/simple

or

sudo pip-3.2 --upgrade pip --index-url=https://pypi.python.org/simple/

I was in a similar situation and wanted to update urllib3 package. What worked for me was:

pip3 install --upgrade --force-reinstall --ignore-installed urllib3==1.25.3

Very Simple. Just download pip from https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py . Save the file in some forlder or dekstop. I saved the file in my D drive.Then from your command prompt navigate to the folder where you have downloaded pip. Then type there

python -get-pip.py