You know, you can create a big project with the Django web framework. But for doing this you need lots of Python libraries that you need to install in your Django project. So every library you want to use, you have to install. We are learning What is requirements.txt file. Expert says it is a very important file that is a simple text file because it contains your Django projects’ all library that your project is using. Sometimes, you forget, how much library and which library my project is using. Getting information from the requirements.txt file you can check that which library and how much library are using in a project.

What is requirements.txt file in Short?

It is the text file (notepad file) generated by the simple command in which that file you will find all the packages that your project is using. You can read the package name and also the specific version that you have installed for your project.

As you are seeing we are discussing requirements.txt file. The filename ‘requirements’ is optional. We can give another name also. But experts and recommended using the requirements name while generating a requirements file, because another developer should understand what is the actual meaning of this file. Because file name also indicates its nature and reality.

How to create requirements.txt file

It is a very simple way to create a requirement file using the command. There is a different way you can create because sometimes it generates some issue, it may problem that which operating system you are using. I share some commands you can generate your project requriement.txt file very easily.

pip freeze > requirements.txt

But you should know, the updated version of Python is 3. So most of the time Python version 2 commands did no work now, we have to mention 3 with pip commands. as you are seeing we are using pip without mentioning 3.

To analyze both commands,

pip3 freeze > requirements.txt # it is for Python3
pip freeze > requirements.txt # it is for Python2

when you run this command you will find a txt file in your root directory or depend upon your location where you run the command.

so in the place of requirements, you can give another name also as:

pip3 freeze > required.txt 

In the case of Anaconda, so running the following command from conda terminal inside the environment and will also create a requirements txt file

conda list -e > requirements.txt

If you have any issues while running this command then please share your problem.

Python Django requirements.txt importance

When you develop a Django project and freeze the requirement file to get all the packages related to your Django project. And you want to share this project with your other developer. The developer may difficulties understanding which packages are installed or need this project. requirement file helps the developer to understand packages’ name, numbers, and their versions.

And one benefit of the requreiment.txt file when you want to install a package for that specific package, if your requirement file contains 100 packages, then you have to install 100 packages. So to avoid this difficulty, we have another command, on running you will get all the packages installed in

Conclusion