I keep getting a message to upgrade pip

Question

Whenever I create a venv, I get a message asking me to upgrade pip. I run the command for upgrade, and it pops up again on another venv. How can I make this permanent.

Message:

You are using pip version 9.0.1, however version 18.0 is available. You should consider upgrading via the 'python -m pip install --upgrade pip' command. 

Update: Just received recommendation to read this possible duplicate answer: virtualenv use upgraded system default pip

This does not solve my issue though. Why?

My pip3 appears to already be up to date:

C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip --version pip 18.0 from c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\python\python36-32\lib\sit e-packages\pip (python 3.6)  C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip3 --version pip 18.0 from c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\python\python36-32\lib\sit e-packages\pip (python 3.6)  C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip3 install --upgrade pip Requirement already up-to-date: pip in c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\p ython\python36-32\lib\site-packages (18.0) 

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Solved

Solution: I was able to fix this altogether by using virtualenv to create a new virtual environment. Not sure if this is a bug in venv. I'll just use the package that works going forward. Thanks @James Lim for the answer.

Answer 1

The issue seems to be that new virtual environments are using an old version of pip. Note that pip is installed from a source tarfile (or wheel) included with virtualenv, in the site-packages/virtualenv_support directory.

$ ls -l /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support pip-9.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl 

A quick way to workaround the problem is to make sure you upgrade pip whenever you create a new virtualenv, like so:

$ virtualenv venv $ venv/bin/pip install -U pip 

Alternatively, make sure you have the latest version of virtualenv. According to their release notes, virtualenv==16 is using pip==10.

$ pip install -U virtualenv 

Finally, since virtualenv looks for pip*.whl in virtualenv_support, this will also work:

$ mv /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support/pip*.whl{,bak} $ pip wheel -w /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support/ 'pip==18' 

All new virtualenvs will use the version of pip that you installed into virtualenv_support. However, this feels hacky.

(Attempted with virtualenv==16. This results in all new virtualenvs with pip==18.)

Answer 2

For me looks like you have multiple python environments and in one of them, there is not an upgraded pip. You have 2 options:

• navigate to each of that folders and update each pip
• you can remove all of them, reinstall and use virtualenv in future with correct pip
• install some IDE (e.g. PyCharm) that can handle that automatically for you and show all issues visually