My solution is to: * use a virtualenv, so that dependencies are installed per project and not globally * only specify my top-level dependencies in a requireme

My solution is to: * use a virtualenv, so that dependencies are installed per project and not globally * only specify my top-level dependencies in a requirements.in file, and let pip-compile (a dependency, part of pip-tools) compile my requirements.txt So far it has served me well and I've not encountered any error due to this method. I cannot claim it is "the right way" though, just something that works for me.