We've successfully organized our code into reusable modules. But what happens when your project grows even larger and you have dozens of modules? Throwing them all into the same directory becomes just as messy as having one giant file. The next level of organization in Python is the package. A package is simply a way to structure your project's modules into a directory hierarchy.
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.