Software & Apps Windows How to Install PIP on Windows Manage Python packages better with PIP by Aaron Peters Writer Aaron Peters is a writer with Lifewire who has 20+ years experience in technology. His work appears in Linux Journal, MakeUseOf, and others. our editorial process Twitter LinkedIn Aaron Peters Updated on December 02, 2020 Tweet Share Email Windows The Ultimate Laptop Buying Guide Most programming languages use the concept of software packages as the mechanism for wrapping up code so other coders can use it. Python has just such a mechanism, called PIP (Package Installer for Python). In this article, learn how to install PIP on a Windows system. These instructions should apply to any Windows system supported by the current Python installer, which includes all versions from Vista onward for the most current version of Python (v3.7 at time of writing). If you have an older machine, you'll need to get the slightly older version of Python, such as v3.4. How to Install PIP on Windows 10 PIP is included out-of-the-box in recent versions of Python, and you'll need Python anyway for PIP to be of any use. Head over to the Downloads page on the website at http://www.python.org to grab the installer for the Python language. The main page should provide a convenient button, but in the event, you land on a page with a list of files, make sure you download the Windows x86-64 executable installer or Windows x86 executable installer, depending on whether you have a 32- or 64-bit machine. Once downloaded, double-click the installer file. On the first screen, select the Add Python 3.7 to PATH option. Select Install Now at the top. You can see this will install a couple extra components: IDLE, a Python Integrated Development Environment; documentation on using Python, and PIP itself. At this point the installer will do its thing and run through the setup process. You'll see a confirmation screen at the end letting you know the install was successful. You can also select Disable path length limit to change a configuration in Windows that doesn't allow access to file paths longer than 260 characters. Using Python on a Windows 10 Machine Python is a programming language, so to use it you'll need to learn how to code in it. That's beyond the scope of this article, but let's check to see if Python is installed properly. Open Command Prompt and type the following: C:\Users\acpke> python --versionPython 3.7.4 You should see Python display its version number. You can also check if it's working correctly by pasting the following code into an empty text file and naming it "hello-world.py" (note the empty line at the end): print ("Hello World!") Now run it: C:\Users\acpke> python \path\to\hello-world.pyHello World! Using PIP to Install Python Packages on a Windows 10 Machine Now that we know Python is functioning, let's examine PIP. Although PIP should already be installed, we can check for it by issuing the following at the command prompt: C:\Users\acpke> pip --help This should show you the Help content for PIP, including the available commands. The most basic one is pip search, which will search the Python Package Index (PyPI) for your search term. For example, suppose we want to create our own custom web browser, the following command will show a list of all the packages in PyPI with the keyword "browser": C:\Users\acpke> pip search browser As you can see in the results in the below screenshot, there's a package called FireSnake-Browser, which is a web browser component already coded in Python. So, instead of having to code things like displaying a page, tabs, and bookmarks, we could just download this and customize it to our needs. You can install a package with the following command: C:\Users\acpke> pip install FireSnake-Browser Unfortunately, updating all installed packages isn't as easy as updating Linux distributions; you need to do so for each package. When you see it's out of date run this command to perform the update: C:\Users\acpke> pip install FireSnake-Browser --upgrade Finally, removing a package is as easy as running this command: C:\Users\acpke> pip uninstall FireSnake-Browser Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Please try again. Thank you for signing up. Tell us why! Other Not enough details Hard to understand Submit