Getting information about distributions

Displaying installed distributions as lists

You can use distil list to see information about installed distributions:

$ distil list
MarkupSafe     0.15
lxml           2.3.5
protobuf       2.4.1
defer          1.0.6
configglue     1.0
dirspec        4.0.0
Mako           0.7.1
zope.interface 3.6.1
feedparser     5.1.2
python-debian  0.1.21-nmu2ubuntu1
debtagshw      0.1
oauth          1.0.1

This display is roughly equivalent to pip freeze. If you want a more verbose display, you can specify -v:

$ distil -v list
MarkupSafe     0.15*
lxml           2.3.5*
protobuf       2.4.1*
defer          1.0.6*
configglue     1.0*
dirspec        4.0.0*
Mako           0.7.1*
zope.interface 3.6.1*
feedparser     5.1.2*
python-debian  0.1.21-nmu2ubuntu1*
debtagshw      0.1*
oauth          1.0.1*
* These are distutils/setuptools/distribute distributions

If you want to see whether there are any more recent versions of installed distributions, specify --latest (which needs -v specified as well):

$ distil -v list --latest
MarkupSafe     0.15*
lxml           2.3.5               (latest: 3.1.0)*
protobuf       2.4.1               (latest: 2.5.0)*
defer          1.0.6*
configglue     1.0                 (latest: 1.0.3)*
dirspec        4.0.0               (latest: 4.1.90)*
Mako           0.7.1               (latest: 0.7.3)*
zope.interface 3.6.1               (latest: 4.0.5)*
feedparser     5.1.2               (latest: 5.1.3)*
python-debian  0.1.21-nmu2ubuntu1*
debtagshw      0.1*
oauth          1.0.1*
* These are distutils/setuptools/distribute distributions

Displaying dependency graphs as lists

The graph command of distil is used to display dependencies of a distribution as a topologically sorted list:

$ distil graph pyramid
PasteDeploy (1.5.0) [for pyramid]
repoze.lru (0.6) [for pyramid]
MarkupSafe (0.15) [for Mako]
translationstring (1.1) [for pyramid]
Chameleon (2.11) [for pyramid]
zope.interface (4.0.5) [for pyramid]
zope.deprecation (4.0.2) [for pyramid]
WebOb (1.2.3) [for pyramid]
Mako (0.7.3) [for pyramid]
pyramid (1.4)

Displaying dependency graphs as images

You can use the --image parameter to distil‘s graph command to produce images through the GraphViz package, specifically the dot command which it includes:

$ distil graph --image flask-sqlalchemy | dot -T png > depend-1.png

This produces the following image: