You have to pass pip the --process-dependency-links flag at install time (which is pretty shitty if users are expecting to be able to install from PyPi normally

You have to pass pip the --process-dependency-links flag at install time (which is pretty shitty if users are expecting to be able to install from PyPi normally) and it will ignore your dependency links if it thinks there is a better package available at PyPi (e.g. some other package with the same name has a higher version or the GitHub repo has some critical bug fixes but still has the same version as the PyPi package). Sometimes you can fool it into working, but it's just been such an unpredictable mess that I've given up on dependency_links for software that's distributed to third-parties.