5 Reasons Why Poetry Beats Pip Python Setup

Modernise your python development process by switching to poetry for dependency and virtual environment management

Photo by Chris Abney in Unsplash

My setup for python projects for the longest time has been the following:

• pyenv for managing python versions.
• venv for managing virtual environments (included in python3).
• pip for dependency handling, and publishing.

As part of my usual stack I also develop a lot in Javascript or Java and I always envied the huge amount of features other package managers and build tools I use daily in my stack like npm, yarn or gradle had in comparison to pip.

Enter Poetry, poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in python that uses pip behind the scenes, but it bakes a ton of functionality on top. So the title is a little misleading as we are still using pip indirectly.

We install Poetry via homebrew or curl and ones its done we'll have access to the command-line tool.