Can I force pip to reinstall the current version?

Question

I've come across situations where a current version of a package seems not to be working and requires reinstallation. But pip install -U won't touch a package that is already up-to-date. I see how to force a reinstallation by first uninstalling (with pip uninstall) and then installing, but is there a way to simply force an "update" to a nominally current version in a single step?

Answer 1

Yes, you can force pip to reinstall the current version below is the command for the same:-

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall <package>

When you are upgrading the pip, you should reinstall all packages even if they are already up-to-date, In that case, you should ignore the installed packages (reinstalling instead). You can use the following command to ignore the installed packages.

pip install -I <package>

pip install --ignore-installed <package>

To know more about this you can have a look at the following video:-

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Comments

This solution worked for me!

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Very well explained. Thank you.

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Does it also works on distributed environment like Google Colab.

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Yes, then it will be like this:
!pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall <package>

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using cached uses the previously stored in the cache, use --no-cache-dir flag to reinstall those too.

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Great! It worked.

Answer 2

For this question, you need to have all three options: 

--upgrade 

--force-reinstall ensures reinstallation, 

--no-deps avoids reinstalling dependencies.

sudo pip install --upgrade --no-deps --force-reinstall <packagename>

Otherwise, that pip starts to recompile Numpy or other large packages.

Comments

This is a more suitable solution for packages having a huge number of dependencies that do not need to be reinstalled. This also serves for offline installs, while the @vishal answer doesn't.

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You must specify --upgrade in addition to --force-reinstall, else it won't have any effect

Answer 3

If you want to reinstall packages defined in a requirements.txt file, without upgrading, so you just have to reinstall the specific versions specified in the requirements.txt file:

pip install -r requirements.txt --ignore-installed

Answer 4

If you have a text file with loads of packages you need to add the -r flag

pip install --upgrade --no-deps --force-reinstall -r requirements.txt

 

Answer 5

It is good to have all three options with you: --upgrade and --force-reinstall ensures reinstallation, while --no-deps avoids reinstalling dependencies.

See the command below:-

$ sudo pip install --upgrade --no-deps --force-reinstall <packagename>

If you don't follow these steps you might run into the problem that pip starts to recompile Numpy or other large packages.