How do I check the versions of Python modules?

Use pip instead of easy_install.

With pip, list all installed packages and their versions via:

pip freeze

On most Linux systems, you can pipe this to grep (or findstr on Windows) to find the row for the particular package you’re interested in.


Linux:

pip freeze | grep lxml

lxml==2.3

Windows:

pip freeze | findstr lxml

lxml==2.3


For an individual module, you can try the __version__ attribute. However, there are modules without it:

python -c "import requests; print(requests.__version__)"
2.14.2

python -c "import lxml; print(lxml.__version__)"

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<string>”, line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘version

Lastly, as the commands in your question are prefixed with sudo, it appears you’re installing to the global python environment. I strongly advise to take look into Python virtual environment managers, for example virtualenvwrapper.

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