Default Pip In Python Virtual Environment Is Ancient, How To Fix It?

I used python3 -m venv to create a virtual environment, in that virtual environment my settings are: python 3.5.2 pip 8.1.1 Mac OS 10.13.6 That pip version is extremely OLD and lea

Solution 1:

As of today, it is not possible.

Starting with Python 3.9 it should be possible to do something like path/to/pythonX.Y -m venv --upgrade-deps .venv, and that would upgrade pip and setuptools in the newly created virtual environment:

• https://bugs.python.org/issue34556
• https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/13100
• https://docs.python.org/3.9/library/venv.html

You could try virtualenv instead, if it suits your workflow better. As far as I know it tries to always install the latest version of pip in the virtual environments it creates.

• https://pypi.org/project/virtualenv/

There is an example of code at the end of venv's documentation showing how to create a tool that downloads and installs up-to-date pip and setuptools:

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html#an-example-of-extending-envbuilder

User wim made an interesting suggestion here:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/60217751

I have a tool called ve that does something similar:

• https://pypi.org/project/ve/

There are some answers to similar questions, suggesting to modify the wheel files bundled with ensurepip in Python's standard library, but I wouldn't recommend that.

Similar questions:

• How to get "python -m venv" to directly install latest pip version
• Why 'python3 -m venv myenv' installs older version of pip into myenv than any version of pip I can find anywhere on the system?