Package Management Operations
Wing supports installing, removing, updating or downgrading packages, and also several operations aimed at keeping the package configuration files up to date or making sure that the packages specified in the configuration are installed.
Installing Packages
There are couple of ways to install packages with Wing's Packages tool:
Install New Packages in the Options menu can be used to find packages by typing a name fragment, selecting those packages, and then installing them.
Install Missing Packages in the Options menu can be used to install all the packages specified in the requirements.txt or Pipfile. This is useful when first setting up a project on a new machine or after editing those files manually to add packages.
Upgrading/Downgrading Packages
The version of packages that are installed can be changed in the following ways:
Update Selected Packages in the Options menu and package list's right-click context menu updates packages to the latest available version.
Set Package Version in the Options menu and packages list's right-click context menu may be used to specify a particular version to use for a package.
Install Missing Packages in the Options menu may also be used to change the versions of installed packages after manually editing requirements.txt or Pipfile.
Removing Packages
Packages may be removed as follows:
Remove Selected Packages in the Options menu and package list's right-click context menu uninstalls packages.
Remove Unused Packages in the Options menu removes all unused packages, including only those that are not listed in the package configuration file and not used by any package that is in use.
Note that you cannot remove pip itself or the packages that it depends on, in order to avoid entirely breaking package management. If this is needed, it should be done outside of Wing. The Packages tool will cease to function and may be removed from the UI by right-clicking on its tab.
pipenv may be removed, if installed, after which only pip can be used for package management from Wing. However, if pipenv is again selected as the package manager, for example explicitly from the Packages tool's Options menu or by auto-detecting a Pipfile in a project, then Wing will auto-install pipenv again. See Pipenv Auto-Install in Package Management with pipenv for details.
Other Operations
Initialize requirements.txt, Initial for Poetry, and Initialize for pipenv are shown in the Options menu when Wing detects that the package manager has not been configured. When using pip this creates a requirements.txt with pip freeze. When using Poetry, this installs poetry and initializes the project directory as a Poetry project directory, by writing pyproject.toml and poetry.lock. When using pipenv, this installs pipenv and initializes the project directory as a pipenv project directory. See Package Manager for details.
Show Selected in PyPI in the Options menu and the package list's right-click context menu displays the Python Package Index (PyPI) page for the selected packages.
Freeze to requirements.txt, Update poetry.lock, Update Pipfile.lock, and Export to environment.yml (for pip, Poetry, pipenv, and conda, respectively) can be used to produce a complete specification of the currently installed package set, including the version for every package. This replaces any existing contents in these package configuration files. When using pip, it retains package order from the existing requirements.txt but adds in any missing packages and fills in versions for all packages.
Refresh in the package list's right-click context menu updates the installed packages list based on the current state. This should only be needed if package operations are invoked outside of Wing.
Managing Configuration Files
When using Poetry, all these operations update pyproject.toml and poetry.lock as if using poetry from the command line.
Similarly, when using pipenv these operations update Pipfile and Pipfile.lock. Additionally, Wing may edit the Pipfile to make it possible to upgrade packages to the latest version, by removing an older version specifier.
When using pip or conda, Wing manages any existing requirements.txt file by adding, removing, or updating packages in it. This can be disabled by unchecking Auto-update requirements.txt in the Options menu in Wing's Packages tool.
