requirements.txt is an essential file that stores the information about all the libraries, modules, and packages that are used while developing a particular project. It contains all the dependencies needed for the project to run.

The traditional way to generate the requirements file is to do

pip freeze > requirements.txt

The above approach works well if you have a virtual env that consists of only the project-specific packages. But in case, you don’t have a virtual env created, pip freeze will save all the packages that were installed in the base environment even if we are not using them in our project.

The easy & faster alternative of pip freeze is the pipreqs package in python.

Generating requirements.txt with pipreqs can be done in two steps:

1. pip install pipreqs
2. checkout to the root project folder and run pipreqs . OR pipreqs /path/to/project . This will directly create the file in the root folder.

→ In case you want to review the packages before creating the file, run pipreqs /path/to/project —-print.

→ If the requirements.txt is already created & you want to overwrite it, pipreqs /path/to/project --force.

→ If there are multiple sub-directories within your project & you want to ignore them while creating the requirements, pipreqs /path/to/project --ignore /path/to/directory

→ If you want to store the packages in some other file, use pipreqs /path/to/project --savepath /location/of/file/

Note: pipreqs scans the .py files in the root folder & uses the imports in the project to generate the file, so in case there are some additional plugin dependencies, you will have to add them manually.