Checking a Python module version at runtime

python module version
Gruff picture Gruff · Apr 2, 2009 · Viewed 76.9k times · Source

Many third-party Python modules have an attribute which holds the version information for the module (usually something like module.VERSION or module.__version__), however some do not.

Particular examples of such modules are libxslt and libxml2.

I need to check that the correct version of these modules are being used at runtime. Is there a way to do this?

A potential solution wold be to read in the source at runtime, hash it, and then compare it to the hash of the known version, but that's nasty.

Is there a better solutions?

Answer

EnigmaCurry picture EnigmaCurry · Feb 8, 2011

Use pkg_resources. Anything installed from PyPI at least should have a version number.

>>> import pkg_resources
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution("blogofile").version
'0.7.1'

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