How to list all installed packages and their versions in Python?

Question

If you have pip install and you want to see what packages have been installed with your installer tools you can simply call this:

pip freeze

It will also include version numbers for the installed packages.

Update

pip has been updated to also produce the same output as pip freeze by calling:

pip list

Note

The output from pip list is formatted differently, so if you have some shell script that parses the output (maybe to grab the version number) of freeze and want to change your script to call list, you'll need to change your parsing code.

help('modules') should do it for you.

in IPython :

In [1]: import                      #import press-TAB
Display all 631 possibilities? (y or n)
ANSI                   audiodev               markupbase
AptUrl                 audioop                markupsafe
ArgImagePlugin         avahi                  marshal
BaseHTTPServer         axi                    math
Bastion                base64                 md5
BdfFontFile            bdb                    mhlib
BmpImagePlugin         binascii               mimetools
BufrStubImagePlugin    binhex                 mimetypes
CDDB                   bisect                 mimify
CDROM                  bonobo                 mmap
CGIHTTPServer          brlapi                 mmkeys
Canvas                 bsddb                  modulefinder
CommandNotFound        butterfly              multifile
ConfigParser           bz2                    multiprocessing
ContainerIO            cPickle                musicbrainz2
Cookie                 cProfile               mutagen
Crypto                 cStringIO              mutex
CurImagePlugin         cairo                  mx
DLFCN                  calendar               netrc
DcxImagePlugin         cdrom                  new
Dialog                 cgi                    nis
DiscID                 cgitb                  nntplib
DistUpgrade            checkbox               ntpath

If you want to get information about your installed python distributions and don't want to use your cmd console or terminal for it, but rather through python code, you can use the following code (tested with python 3.4):

import pip #needed to use the pip functions
for i in pip.get_installed_distributions(local_only=True):
    print(i)

The pip.get_installed_distributions(local_only=True) function-call returns an iterable and because of the for-loop and the print function the elements contained in the iterable are printed out separated by new line characters (\n). The result will (depending on your installed distributions) look something like this:

cycler 0.9.0
decorator 4.0.4
ipykernel 4.1.0
ipython 4.0.0
ipython-genutils 0.1.0
ipywidgets 4.0.3
Jinja2 2.8
jsonschema 2.5.1
jupyter 1.0.0
jupyter-client 4.1.1
#... and so on...

from command line

python -c help('modules')

can be used to view all modules, and for specific modules

python -c help('os')

For Linux below will work

python -c "help('os')"

To run this in later versions of pip (tested on pip==10.0.1) use the following:

from pip._internal.operations.freeze import freeze
for requirement in freeze(local_only=True):
    print(requirement)