How to save Python packages to a requirements.txt file

Introduction

This tutorial article assumes a Python project with a virtual environment set up, check this article about virtual environments here

1. Installing Python packages

To install a package like Pandas using pip

pip install pandas

2. Generate requirements.txt

pip freeze --local > requirements.txt

The --local flag ensures that globally installed packages are not listed even if our virtual env has global access.

The contents of our requirements.txt file would be as follows:

cat requirements.txt

The above outputs:

numpy==1.25.1
pandas==2.0.3
python-dateutil==2.8.2
pytz==2023.3
six==1.16.0
tzdata==2023.3

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