If that's the desired behavior, it's already pretty easy by piping the outdated package list into upgrade. pip list --outdated | sed 's/(.*//g' | xargs pip

If that's the desired behavior, it's already pretty easy by piping the outdated package list into upgrade. pip list --outdated | sed 's/(.*//g' | xargs pip install -U pip freeze > requirements.txt From http://stackoverflow.com/a/22260015/149428 http://stackoverflow.com/a/22260015/149428 Another similar easy option is pip-review. https://github.com/jgonggrijp/pip-review https://github.com/jgonggrijp/pip-review