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Writing Your Own Python Package Manager From Scratch
What I Learned While Reinventing the Wheel in Python
When I first thought about writing my own package manager in Python, I asked myself: Why? We already have pip, conda, poetry, and others that work just fine. But digging deeper, I realized that building one from scratch would teach me an incredible amount about Python internals, HTTP, dependency resolution, and file management.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how I built a minimal but functional package manager in Python, what challenges I faced, and how you can extend the same idea to create your own.
1. Why Build a Package Manager in the First Place?
At first, I treated this project as a learning exercise. A package manager is the perfect “systems” project for Python developers because it touches multiple areas at once:
- Network requests (downloading packages)
- File handling (installing/unpacking packages)
- Dependency resolution (keeping track of versions)
- Command-line interfaces (making it easy to use)
By re-creating a stripped-down version of pip, I gained insight into how software distribution actually works under the hood.