32 engineers on Hacker News describe using pip first-hand: 9 endorse it, 8 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“it's quite hard to ship because some pip packages require to be built.”
regret · production · bionsystem · 2026-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had a sense back then that pip was not great, but I had very little idea of what was wrong with it or why.”
regret · personal · zahlman · 2025-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“since 22.3, Pip has improved support for installing cross-environment, and IMX it Just Works”
mixed · personal · zahlman · 2024-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I ran into some dependency hell a while back after globally installing Python packages with pip. Never again.”
regret · personal · arcanemachiner · 2024-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“pip is performant enough for me when not doing the hard work of dependency resolution, and for some reason it's not cached.”
mixed · production · danmur · 2024-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Which I'll figure out when pip install -r breaks, and then I get to a) apt-get/brew/etc. install the lib”
regret · production · EdwardDiego · 2023-09-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I even submitted a couple pip patches, never again.”
regret · personal · nerpderp82 · 2023-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“pip + requirements.txt haven't been able to handle even fairly complex install situations.”
endorse · production · ghshephard · 2022-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using Python since 1.2 and never had this kind of problem since we moved to pip.”
endorse · personal · rcarmo · 2022-09-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“pip is the place where things "just work" so now we just use pip, no touchups required.”
endorse · production · jjoonathan · 2022-07-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was happy with Pip until I spent time in the NPM/Yarn world. Frustrated with Pip I switched half of our projects to Pipenv.”
mixed · production · Humphrey · 2020-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Pip is not deterministic. Things that worked in dev and staging would end up borking prod”
regret · production · nojvek · 2020-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Pipenv seems to greedly somehow upgrade my pip and thusly hoses everything”
regret · personal · grumps · 2018-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“running `pip freeze > requirements.txt` is sufficient for me.”
endorse · personal · coleifer · 2018-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run multiple webapps on a machine by just installing dependencies in a directory (pip -t) in the git repo”
endorse · production · icebraining · 2017-09-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Removing 'bundle' was painful for us”
regret · production · themartorana · 2014-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using virtualenv/pip for years and it always served me very well. Made development, testing, and deployment easier.”
endorse · production · d0m · 2013-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our developers don't have any problems with it.”
endorse · production · kevcampb · 2013-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use a Ubuntu box for development and rvm/bundler, virtualenv/pip...cover my needs”
endorse · personal · irahul · 2013-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Makes it super easy to install our own packages over Pip, as well as ensure that dependancies are nice and clean.”
endorse · production · supwiggles · 2013-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Locate that pip and directly invoke it to self-update with hash pinning, rather than going through pipx”
neutral · personal · zahlman · 2026-10-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we replaced all our of 'pip' with 'uv pip'”
neutral · production · walthamstow · 2025-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I install almost all packages with pip, except for any binaries or CUDA related things from conda.”
neutral · personal · alsodumb · 2024-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our CI system for one of our tools runs commands like `pip install -U setuptools`.”
neutral · production · danudey · 2022-07-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“copy that into the image, and pip install.”
neutral · production · butisaidsudo · 2022-07-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Switch to using Pip inside the Conda env to suss out what the non-Python deps are.”
neutral · production · nerdponx · 2021-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After trying to replace pip with Pipenv, we had to stop.”
neutral · production · cik · 2018-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We just use a requirements.txt for each service and run pip with the -r flag in the dockerfile.”
neutral · production · VonGallifrey · 2018-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our installations of nginx[1], Python[2], pip[3], rust[4], mongo, consul[4], openldap[1], gcc[3]”
neutral · production · deathanatos · 2015-03-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run pip install with a "--proxy http://localhost:9999 argument”
neutral · production · simonw · 2013-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a separate pip requirements file for each environment (also kept in source control)”
neutral · production · adamcharnock · 2010-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“just install them in a virtualenv using pip.”
neutral · personal · GeneralMaximus · 2010-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?