I'm trying to get the version number of a specific few modules that I use. Something that I can store in a variable.
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5Related: [Checking Python module version at runtime](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/710609/checking-python-module-version-at-runtime) – ire_and_curses Aug 19 '10 at 17:00
6 Answers
Use pkg_resources(part of setuptools). Anything installed from PyPI at least has a version number. No extra package/module is needed.
>>> import pkg_resources
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution("simplegist").version
'0.3.2'

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pkg_resources import is very slow, the recommended way since Python 3.8 is via `importlib.metadata.version` as outlined above – rth Feb 22 '22 at 11:49
Generalized answer from Matt's, do a dir(YOURMODULE)
and look for __version__
, VERSION
, or version
. Most modules like __version__
but I think numpy
uses version.version

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11Just to note that `__version__` is the preferred standard for new code, as recommended by [PEP8](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/). See [Standard way to embed version into Python package?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/458550/standard-way-to-embed-version-into-python-package) – ire_and_curses Aug 19 '10 at 17:07
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1It seems like it only works for packages that define `__version__`, no? – Dr_Zaszuś Mar 17 '21 at 13:03
Starting Python 3.8
, importlib.metadata
can be used as a replacement for pkg_resources
to extract the version of third-party packages installed via tools such as pip
:
from importlib.metadata import version
version('wheel')
# '0.33.4'

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It now is ```from importlib_metadata import version``` for me --- so underscore instead of dot. – OnceUponATime Sep 21 '22 at 19:41
I think it depends on the module. For example, Django has a VERSION variable that you can get from django.VERSION
, sqlalchemy has a __version__
variable that you can get from sqlalchemy.__version__
.

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django also has `django.get_version()`, which returns a string rather than a tuple. When in doubt, `dir(module)`. – Seth Aug 19 '10 at 17:01
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Or you can use the `getmembers` function from the [inspect module](http://docs.python.org/library/inspect.html). – ire_and_curses Aug 19 '10 at 17:04
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The above works for mock too. No luck with .get_distribution("xxx").version() – Sian Lerk Lau Jan 02 '14 at 05:22
Some modules (e.g. azure) do not provide a __version__
string.
If the package was installed with pip, the following should work.
# say we want to look for the version of the "azure" module
import pip
for m in pip.get_installed_distributions():
if m.project_name == 'azure':
print(m.version)

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2I'm getting `AttributeError: module 'pip' has no attribute 'get_installed_distributions'`. Same result in Jupyter 5.0.0 and VS Code 1.30.2 using pip version 18.1. Any suggestions? – Karl Baker Jan 18 '19 at 00:09
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Sorry: looks like they changed the internal APIs of pip. It was not a supported use, anyway. https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5154 – phzx_munki Sep 26 '19 at 19:53
import sys
import matplotlib as plt
import pandas as pd
import sklearn as skl
import seaborn as sns
print(sys.version)
print(plt.__version__)
print(pd.__version__)
print(skl.__version__)
print(sns.__version__)
The above code shows versions of respective modules: Sample O/P:
3.7.1rc1 (v3.7.1rc1:2064bcf6ce, Sep 26 2018, 14:21:39) [MSC v.1914 32 bit (Intel)] 3.1.0 0.24.2 0.21.2 0.9.0 (sys shows version of python )

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