How to check if a module is installed in Python and, if not, install it within the code?

Question

EDIT – 2020/02/03

The pip module has updated quite a lot since the time I posted this answer. I’ve updated the snippet with the proper way to install a missing dependency, which is to use subprocess and pkg_resources, and not pip.

To hide the output, you can redirect the subprocess output to devnull:

import sys
import subprocess
import pkg_resources

required = {'mutagen', 'gTTS'}
installed = {pkg.key for pkg in pkg_resources.working_set}
missing = required - installed

if missing:
    python = sys.executable
    subprocess.check_call([python, '-m', 'pip', 'install', *missing], stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL)

Like @zwer mentioned, the above works, although it is not seen as a proper way of packaging your project. To look at this in better depth, read the the page How to package a Python App.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply