A while back I was doing some spring cleaning of my Python packages. I noticed that there were a bunch of packages that I couldn’t recall installing. I wanted to know if I could safely remove them, so I wrote a simple bash script to tell me called pip-uses.

Source

Rather than post the source here and let it get more out of date every time I change it, you can find the source on GitHub. It’s in my bin repository, where I keep my notable helper scripts; feel free to poke around.

Motivations

I was primarily influenced by Homebrew’s brew uses command. It does a nice job of giving you exactly the information you want, and I think the way the command is named makes sense.

$ brew uses --installed pango
imagemagick

pip-uses gives you basically the experience:

$ pip-uses stevedore
virtualenvwrapper

In this example, the Python package virtualenvwrapper uses stevedore, just as imagemagick uses pango. Both commands can save you from accidentally removing a crucial dependency and answer the burning question, “How in the world did this thing get installed?”

Wish List

I’m not doing much Python development these days, but if I had some spare time I’d love for the script to also have these features:

• Recursive enumeration of dependencies
  • It’d be nice if pip-uses kept recursively searching until it found no more dependencies. This way, it’d be easy to see if you could safely uninstall a whole slew of packages that you’re no longer using.
• Operate on more than one package
  • I didn’t need it at the time, so I didn’t implement it, but it’d be nice if the command took a variable amount of arguments and ran the same logic on all supplied packages.
• Integrate with pip
  • Programs like brew and pip allow developers to add “external commands” by adding commands to the PATH that look like brew-xyz or git-xyz. I couldn’t find if there was a special way to add external commands to pip.

If you find this script useful and end up implementing one of these feature or more on top of pip-uses, be sure to send me a Pull Request!