Summary

This article will show you how to fix your Python setup such that virtual environments that you create will have the correct version of PIP

The Story

I frequently take screen shots as part of my article writing process.  And it absolutely drives me crazy to have “crap” on the screen e.g. warning messages.  I was recently working on an article about PyVISA – a Python package for interacting with Lab Instruments – when I got this error message about the wrong PIP version.

But how can this be as I know that I have the correct version (which at the time was 20.0.2).  You obviously can “fix” this by running an upgrade of pip in your virtual environment.

But that doesn’t really “fix” it.  It just means that the virtual environment you just created has the most up to date PIP.  What is frustrating is that when you exit the virtual environment, the PIP version is correct (look 20.0.2)

Why are the environments differ?   The answer is when you create a virtual environment it will copy Python, pip and easy_install to your binary directory.

As part of doing this it will pickup the “ensurepip” version of PIP which is embedded in the Python installation on your computer.  Ensure pip just ensures that there will be a pip version available in any given Python installation even though Pip is not installed with Python.  On my computer the ensurepip is embedded deeply in a Hombrew directory:

In the screen above you can see that my ensurepip has “19.2.3” when the rest of my computer is set to “20.0.2”. So how do you fix the ensurepip?  Well I first thought that perhaps running the “ensurepip” with the upgrade flag would do it.  Here is what happens.  It seems to fix it.  (but it doesn’t).

The only way that I know how to fix it is install the Python module upgrade_ensurepip.  Here are the commands

• pip3 install upgrade_ensurepip
• python3 -m upgrade_ensurepip

Now you when create a virtual environment you will end up with the correct PIP

If you look in the directory you will find that it adds the “pip… whl” director into the ensurepip directory

And it modifies the “_PIP_VERSION” in the ensurepip package __init.py