PyPi Simple Search

A stop-gap replacement for pip search

What?

There are two scripts here, pypi-simple-search and pip-pss. The former is a script that replaces part of the functionality of pip search by infrequently caching the list of packages from PyPi Simple Index locally, and then searching the cache when called, resulting in a list of matching package names (and optionally descriptions). The latter is a wrapper for pip that calls pypi-simple-search when passed the search subcommand, and can be used in an alias to replace pip.

Why?

The functionality of pip search has been deprecated for reasons described here. Since a package manager should have a way to search the package repository, I wrote this script for my own use and decided to share it.

Installation

The executables are just bash scripts that can be copied somewhere in your $PATH. You can also do

make install

to copy the scripts to /usr/local/bin. There is also

make uninstall

that will remove the executables.

Usage

Once the executables are in your $PATH, you can use the search functionality by calling

pypi-simple-search [OPTIONS] [ARGS]

When executed, the script will search a local cache of the contents of the PyPi Simple Index and return packages that match the arguments.

The options available are

-h     Show the help menu
-u     Update the local PyPi package cache
-m     Display package descriptions from metadata

The update will happen automatically when the script is first called, and also when the cache is more than a week old.

The command used to search the cache defaults to grep, but may be customized by setting the $PYPI_SIMPLE_SEARCH environment variable to e.g. "rg" or "ag" or "grep -E", etc.

The wrapper script can be used as a replacement for pip by calling

pip-pss search foo

This is equivalent to

pypi-simple-search foo

If search is not the subcommand passed, e.g.

pip-pss install foo

this will be equivalent to

pip install foo

It's easiest to just add an alias to your ~/.bash_aliases

alias pip="pip-pss"

so you can rely on muscle memory whenever you need to know how to properly spell a package name (at least until a more sustainable solution arrives).

Contributing

If my implementation can be improved or if you find a bug, feel free to raise it as an issue or submit a pull request.