Authentication#

Basic HTTP authentication#

pip supports basic HTTP-based authentication credentials. This is done by providing the username (and optionally password) in the URL:

https://username:password@pypi.company.com/simple

For indexes that only require single-part authentication tokens, provide the token as the “username” and do not provide a password:

https://0123456789abcdef@pypi.company.com/simple

Percent-encoding special characters#

New in version 10.0.

Certain special characters are not valid in the credential part of a URL. If the user or password part of your login credentials contain any of these special characters, then they must be percent-encoded. As an example, for a user with username user and password he//o accessing a repository at pypi.company.com/simple, the URL with credentials would look like:

https://user:he%2F%2Fo@pypi.company.com/simple

netrc support#

pip supports loading credentials from a user’s .netrc file. If no credentials are part of the URL, pip will attempt to get authentication credentials for the URL’s hostname from the user’s .netrc file. This behaviour comes from the underlying use of requests, which in turn delegates it to the Python standard library’s netrc module.

Note

As mentioned in the standard library documentation for netrc, only ASCII characters are allowed in .netrc files. Whitespace and non-printable characters are not allowed in passwords.

Below is an example .netrc, for the host example.com, with a user named daniel, using the password qwerty:

machine example.com
login daniel
password qwerty

More information about the .netrc file format can be found in the GNU ftp man pages.

Keyring Support#

pip supports loading credentials stored in your keyring using the keyring library, which can be enabled py passing --keyring-provider with a value of auto, disabled, import, or subprocess. The default value auto respects --no-input and does not query keyring at all if the option is used; otherwise it tries the import, subprocess, and disabled providers (in this order) and uses the first one that works.

Configuring pip’s keyring usage#

Since the keyring configuration is likely system-wide, a more common way to configure its usage would be to use a configuration instead:

Using keyring’s Python module#

Setting keyring-provider to import makes pip communicate with keyring via its Python interface.

# install keyring from PyPI
$ pip install keyring --index-url https://pypi.org/simple
$ echo "your-password" | keyring set pypi.company.com your-username
$ pip install your-package --keyring-provider import --index-url https://pypi.company.com/

Using keyring as a command line application#

Setting keyring-provider to subprocess makes pip look for and use the keyring command found on PATH.

For this use case, a username must be included in the URL, since it is required by keyring’s command line interface. See the example below or the basic HTTP authentication section at the top of this page.

# Install keyring from PyPI using pipx, which we assume is installed properly
# you can also create a venv somewhere and add it to the PATH yourself instead
$ pipx install keyring --index-url https://pypi.org/simple

# For Azure DevOps, also install its keyring backend.
$ pipx inject keyring artifacts-keyring --index-url https://pypi.org/simple

# For Google Artifact Registry, also install and initialize its keyring backend.
$ pipx inject keyring keyrings.google-artifactregistry-auth --index-url https://pypi.org/simple
$ gcloud auth login

# Note that a username is required in the index URL.
$ pip install your-package --keyring-provider subprocess --index-url https://username@pypi.example.com/

Here be dragons#

The auto provider is conservative and does not query keyring at all when --no-input is used because the keyring might require user interaction such as prompting the user on the console. Third party tools frequently call Pip for you and do indeed pass --no-input as they are well-behaved and don’t have much information to work with. (Keyring does have an api to request a backend that does not require user input.) You have more information about your system, however!

You can force keyring usage by requesting a keyring provider other than auto (or disabled). Leaving import and subprocess. You do this by passing --keyring-provider import or one of the following methods:

# via config file, possibly with --user, --global or --site
$ pip config set global.keyring-provider subprocess
# or via environment variable
$ export PIP_KEYRING_PROVIDER=import

Warning

Be careful when doing this since it could cause tools such as pipx and Pipenv to appear to hang. They show their own progress indicator while hiding output from the subprocess in which they run Pip. You won’t know whether the keyring backend is waiting the user input or not in such situations.

pip is conservative and does not query keyring at all when --no-input is used because the keyring might require user interaction such as prompting the user on the console. You can force keyring usage by passing --force-keyring or one of the following:

# possibly with --user, --global or --site
$ pip config set global.force-keyring true
# or
$ export PIP_FORCE_KEYRING=1

Warning

Note that keyring (the Python package) needs to be installed separately from pip. This can create a bootstrapping issue if you need the credentials stored in the keyring to download and install keyring.

It is, thus, expected that users that wish to use pip’s keyring support have some mechanism for downloading and installing keyring.