So far, we've worked with our own modules and those from Python's extensive Standard Library. But the true power of the Python ecosystem comes from the millions of third-party packages created by the community. To access this vast universe of code, you need a package manager. For Python, that tool is pip.
In the last article, we learned the basics of pip for installing and removing individual packages. While that's useful, real-world projects almost always depend on multiple external packages. Managing these dependencies is a critical skill for collaboration and for ensuring your project runs reliably on different machines.
We've learned how to install packages with pip and manage them with a requirements.txt file. This is a great workflow, but it has one major flaw: by default, pip installs packages globally.