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Install a dependency

The acs in pipacs is for "add, compile, sync."

Instead of using pip install directly to add a library, beautifulsoup4, to our new project, we'll use pipacs to:

  • add a new line "beautifulsoup4" to ./requirements.in
  • compile (as pip-tools uses the term) our ./requirements.in into a fully version-locked, line-oriented ./requirements.txt
  • sync (again, the pip-tools term) our current environment to the compiled lockfile -- install everything as listed in requirements.txt and uninstall everything else
[venv] % pipacs beautifulsoup4

Animated demo: pipacs

Being such a popular package, we were able to tab-complete the name beautifulsoup4, reducing the risk of mistyping. The complete-able package list comes from hugovk/top-pypi-packages.

When pipacs does too much

You won't always want to add, compile, and sync all at once. Some closely related zpy functions are pipa, pipc, pips, pipac, and pipcs.

All of their --help outputs, as for any set of zpy functions, can be viewed at once, by providing them as arguments to the zpy help subcommand:

% zpy help pipa pipc pips pipac pipcs

Without any arguments, running zpy help displays help for all zpy functions.

% zpy help pipacs

# Add to requirements.in, compile it to requirements.txt, then sync to that (add, compile, sync).
# Use -c to affect categorized requirements, and -h to include hashes.
pipacs [-c <category>] [-h] <pkgspec>... [-- <pip-compile-arg>...]

Tip

When a zpy function internally calls pip-compile or uv pip compile, it provides these flags by default: 

--no-header --annotation-style=line --strip-extras --allow-unsafe
You can add pip-compile flags in a particular instance using the double dash syntax, like: 
% pipc -- --no-annotate --verbose
You can also replace those default flags for the current shell (or in your ~/.zshrc) using zstyle, like: 
% zstyle ':zpy:*' pip-compile-args --header --annotation-style=split