pip - requirements.txt depending on python version

Question

I'm trying to port a python2 package to python3 (not my own) using six so that it's compatible with both. However one of the packages listed in requirements.txt is now included in the python3 stdlib and the pypi version doesn't work in python3 so I want to conditionally exclude it. Doing this in setup.py is easy, I can just do something like:

if sys.version_info[0] == 2:
    requirements += py2_requirements
else:
    requirements += py3_requirements

But I would like requirements.txt to reflect the correct list too. I can't find anything on this in the pip documentation. so does anyone know how to do it, or if it is even possible?

Answer 1

You can use the environment markers to achieve this in requirements.txt since pip 6.0:

SomeProject==5.4; python_version < '2.7'
SomeProject; sys_platform == 'win32'

It is supported by setuptools too by declaring extra requirements in setup.py:

setup(
    ...
    install_requires=[
        'six',
        'humanize',
    ],
    extras_require={
        ':python_version == "2.7"': [
            'ipaddress',
        ],
    },
)

See also requirement specifiers. And Strings for the string versions of corresponding Python commands.