Since Python 3.9 the stdlib venv
module has EnvBuilder.upgrade_dependencies
. Unfortunately, it has two shortcomings:
- Won't really help users to install a specific pip version, only the latest.
- It still installs the vendored pip and setuptools versions first, and then uninstall them if they're outdated, which they almost always will be in practice.
It would be ideal to install the latest versions directly! The venv
CLI provides a --without-pip
argument that is useful here. You can use this to opt-out of the vendored pip, and then actually use the vendored pip wheel to install your desired pip version instead (along with any other packages you might want in a freshly created virtual environment).
It's best to put it into a function - this goes into your shell profile or rc file:
function ve() {
local py="python3"
if [ ! -d ./.venv ]; then
echo "creating venv..."
if ! $py -m venv .venv --prompt=$(basename $PWD) --without-pip; then
echo "ERROR: Problem creating venv" >&2
return 1
else
local whl=$($py -c "import pathlib, ensurepip; [whl] = pathlib.Path(ensurepip.__path__[0]).glob('_bundled/pip*.whl'); print(whl)")
echo "boostrapping pip using $whl"
.venv/bin/python $whl/pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
source .venv/bin/activate
fi
else
source .venv/bin/activate
fi
}
As written, this function just pulls latest pip
, setuptools
, and wheel
from index. To force specific versions you can just change this line of the shell script:
.venv/bin/python $whl/pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
Into this, for example:
.venv/bin/python $whl/pip install pip==19.3.1
For Python 2.7 users, you may do a similar trick because virtualenv
provides similar command-line options in --no-pip
, --no-setuptools
, and --no-wheel
, and there is still a vendored pip wheel available to bootstrap since Python 2.7.9. Pathlib will not be available, so you'll need to change the pathlib
usage into os.path
+ glob
.