In requirements.txt, what does tilde equals (~=) mean?

python requirements.txt
James Hiew picture James Hiew · Sep 20, 2016 · Viewed 27.5k times · Source

In the requirements.txt for a Python library I am using, one of the requirements is specified like:

mock-django~=0.6.10

What does ~= mean?

Answer

Maxime Lorant picture Maxime Lorant · Sep 20, 2016

It means it will select the latest version of the package, greater than or equal to 0.6.10, but still in the 0.6.* version, so it won't download 0.7.0 for example. It ensures you will get security fixes but keep backward-compatibility, if the package maintainer respects the semantic versioning (which states that breaking changes should occur only in major versions).

Or, as said by PEP 440:

For a given release identifier V.N , the compatible release clause is approximately equivalent to the pair of comparison clauses:

>= V.N, == V.*

Related questions

Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement <package>

I'm installing several Python packages in Ubuntu 12.04 using the following requirements.txt file: numpy>=1.8.2,<2.0.0 matplotlib>=1.3.1,<2.0.0 scipy>=0.14.0,<1.0.0 astroML>=0.2,<1.0 scikit-learn>=0.14.1,<1.0.0 rpy2>=2.4.3,<3.0.0 and these two commands: $ pip install --download=/tmp -r …

Read More
How to use requirements.txt to install all dependencies in a python project

I am new to python. Recently I got a project written by python and it requires some installation. I run below command to install but got an error. # pip install requirements.txt Collecting requirements.txt Could not find a version …

Read More
How to state in requirements.txt a direct github source

I've installed a library using the command pip install git+git://github.com/mozilla/elasticutils.git which installs it directly from a Github repository. This works fine and I want to have that dependency in my requirements.txt. I've looked …

Read More