Pip-compile for better requirements

You can install pip-tools via:

python -m pip install pip-tools

Once that is done, you should be able to confirm that it is installed via:

python -m piptools

We're going to focus on the compile command first, which you can run via pip-compile or python -m piptools compile.

How pip-compile works

The idea behind pip-compile is that we are going to generate a requirements.txt file from a requirements.in file. The requirements.in file will be the entry point for the developer and the requirements.txt file will then become a very exact representation of all the packages that your project needs.

If you have a requirements.in file that looks like this:

scikit-learn==1.4.2

Then you can run this command:

pip-compile requirements.in -o requirements.txt 

To generate a new requirements file that looks like this:

#
# This file is autogenerated by pip-compile with Python 3.11
# by the following command:
#
#    pip-compile --output-file=requirements.txt requirements.in
#
joblib==1.4.0
    # via scikit-learn
numpy==1.26.4
    # via
    #   scikit-learn
    #   scipy
scikit-learn==1.4.2
    # via -r requirements.in
scipy==1.13.0
    # via scikit-learn
threadpoolctl==3.4.0
    # via scikit-learn

Notice how all the dependencies are listed here with exact version numbers? Pip-tools is making sure these version numbers are up to the specification of the input file. This is great!