Best practices: Managing requirements.txt

Using Django Deployment
3

I recommend using pip-compile. This is a tool that will take a requirements.in file with a ranged specifiers, and “compile” them into a requirements.txt that uses exact pinned version numbers (==).

For example, you can write in your requirements.in just:

django>=3.2,<4.0

Then compile it with:

$ pip-compile
...

And your resulting requirements.txt will contain (with current version numbers):

#
# This file is autogenerated by pip-compile with python 3.9
# To update, run:
#
#    pip-compile
#
asgiref==3.4.1
    # via django
django==3.2.9
    # via -r requirements.in
pytz==2021.3
    # via django
sqlparse==0.4.2
    # via django

You can later upgrade everything with pip-compile -U.

This will make it a lot easier to keep your versions pinned, but updated. It also solves problems with unpinned/added/removed transitive dependencies (the dependencies of your dependencies).

Hope that helps!

(I’m writing a whole section on pip-compile in my upcoming Django development experience book.)

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