Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
My LWN Story Summarizing PyPI's Overhaul
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2018 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
This coming Monday, April 16th, we plan to flip the switch on the new PyPI and redirect https://pypi.python.org web browser requests and pip install requests so the codebase serving them is Warehouse (which is in beta right now at https://pypi.org). I'm proud of our team's work and hope you find it useful.
I haven't blogged here in a while, but I've been writing a lot, mostly announcements and explanations listed on, or a few hyperlinks away from, the onwiki index to my PyPI work. When I can't give people choices (and, unless your organization sets up a private package index/repository, PyPI can feel like the only game in town), I want to give them a lot of lead time to test, file bug reports, and migrate, and I want to provide backstory.
So: today LWN publishes a new article by me, "A new package index for Python". In it, I discuss security, policy, UX and developer experience changes in the 15+ years since PyPI's founding, new features (and deprecated old features) in Warehouse, and future plans. Plus: screenshots!
This summary should help occasional Python programmers understand why a new PyPI codebase is necessary, what's new, what features are going away, and what to expect in the near future.
If you aren't already a subscriber, you can use this subscriber link for the next week to read the article despite the LWN paywall. Thanks to LWN for the venue and the subscriber links, and thanks to Jake Edge in particular for thorough editing. Thanks to my Warehouse team for fact-checking me.
