I keep getting a message to upgrade pip

Question

Whenever I create a venv, I get a message asking me to upgrade pip. I run the command for upgrade, and it pops up again on another venv. How can I make this permanent.

Message:

You are using pip version 9.0.1, however version 18.0 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'python -m pip install --upgrade pip' command.

Update: Just received recommendation to read this possible duplicate answer: virtualenv use upgraded system default pip

This does not solve my issue though. Why?

My pip3 appears to already be up to date:

C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip --version
pip 18.0 from c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\python\python36-32\lib\sit
e-packages\pip (python 3.6)

C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip3 --version
pip 18.0 from c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\python\python36-32\lib\sit
e-packages\pip (python 3.6)

C:\Users\mkupfer\Python-Sandbox\sibc-python-scripts>pip3 install --upgrade pip
Requirement already up-to-date: pip in c:\users\mkupfer\appdata\local\programs\p
ython\python36-32\lib\site-packages (18.0)

---

Solved

Solution: I was able to fix this altogether by using virtualenv to create a new virtual environment. Not sure if this is a bug in venv. I'll just use the package that works going forward. Thanks @James Lim for the answer.

Answer 1

The issue seems to be that new virtual environments are using an old version of pip. Note that pip is installed from a source tarfile (or wheel) included with virtualenv, in the site-packages/virtualenv_support directory.

$ ls -l /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support
pip-9.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl

A quick way to workaround the problem is to make sure you upgrade pip whenever you create a new virtualenv, like so:

$ virtualenv venv
$ venv/bin/pip install -U pip

Alternatively, make sure you have the latest version of virtualenv. According to their release notes, virtualenv==16 is using pip==10.

$ pip install -U virtualenv

Finally, since virtualenv looks for pip*.whl in virtualenv_support, this will also work:

$ mv /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support/pip*.whl{,bak}
$ pip wheel -w /path/to/site-packages/virtualenv_support/ 'pip==18'

All new virtualenvs will use the version of pip that you installed into virtualenv_support. However, this feels hacky.

(Attempted with virtualenv==16. This results in all new virtualenvs with pip==18.)