Published on

Working Out an Existing Python Project's requirements.txt file

Authors

I have spent the past day or two trying to get a Python project running. The problem with this project is there is no requirements.txt file so I have to keep running the code and trying to install any missing dependencies.

Luckily today I came across this excellent article. The portion that helped me the most was installing and using pipreqs.

Pipreqs is fairly simple:

  • You install it globally: pip install pipreqs.
  • You then point it to the project you want to generate the requirements.txt file for: pipreqs /path/to/python/codebase.
  • Pipreqs then looks at the project's imports and places a requirements.txt in the root of the target project.

I had to do a few more things to get the dependencies to install but pipreqs got me 99% of the way there.