Third-Party Packages

Python Package Index

There are many third party libraries (also called packages) that can be installed into your Python. These libraries are collected in the Python Package Index, where you can search for libraries and find out information about them.

Python Package Installer

Python comes with a module pip that is used to manage libraries in Python.

Let’s try an example of using pip to install the ipython package so that we can take advantage of the IPython shell. It provides a powerful interactive Python shell and a Jupyter kernel to work with Python code in Jupyter notebooks and other interactive frontends. We recommend using the IPython shell for running Python locally.

$ python3 -m pip install ipython

If you are on a Windows machine, you might need to type “py” or “py -3” instead of “python3” in order to use the most recent version of Python 3 that is installed on your machine.

To run the IPython shell, start it like this:

$ ipython

If you are on Windows and get an error, then you need to start it like this:

$ py -3 -m IPython

More on pip

For more on using pip to install Python packages see Installing Python packages.