Problem

The python package installer pip can be used to install directly from Github, like so:

$ pip install git+git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git#egg=django-oscar

This will install from the HEAD of the master branch. However, when you use pip freeze to export your dependencies (usually to a requirements.txt file), pip will fix the reference to a specific commit by including its ID within the URL:

$ pip freeze | grep oscar
-e git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git@d636b803d98cd1d3edd01821d4fb2a01ce215ee4#egg=django_oscar-dev

Hence running pip install -r requirements.txt will not pick any commits after d636b803 until requirements.txt is updated.

This isn't always the desired behaviour; in some circumstances, you would prefer for pip install -r requirements.txt to always install the latest version from Github.

Solution

Simply delete the commit ID from URL - that is, change:

-e git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git@d636b803d98cd1d3edd01821d4fb2a01ce215ee4#egg=django-oscar

to

-e git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git#egg=django-oscar

This can be done by hand once you've used

pip freeze > requirements.txt

to create your requirements file, or by using sed:

$ pip freeze | sed 's/@[a-z0-9]\+//' > requirements.txt

Discussion

The text between @ and # in the github URL specifies the commit to install from. Rather than a commit ID, a branch or tag name can be used also. Hence:

pip install -e git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git@0.1#egg=django-oscar

will install the 0.1 tag, while:

pip install -e git://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar.git@releases/0.1#egg=django-oscar

will install from the HEAD of the releases/0.1 branch.