piptotal

piptotal is a lightweight command‑line utility that integrates with the Python package installer pip to report statistics about a Python environment. The primary function of piptotal is to display the total number of packages currently installed in the active environment, optionally filtered by additional criteria such as package category, distribution type, or version constraints. By default, piptotal enumerates all top‑level distributions that pip knows about and simplifies the output to a single integer that can be piped or consumed by other tooling.

The tool was introduced in 2020 by a community contributor seeking to streamline environment audits and is available as a separate PyPI distribution that can be installed with “pip install piptotal”. Once installed, it can be invoked from any shell that has access to the Python interpreter, for example:

or with filtering options such as:

piptotal --exclude setuptools,distutils

The utility supports both virtual and system‑wide Python installations and respects the current PYTHONPATH. It also includes a --json flag that returns a structured JSON payload with per‑package details, which can be useful for automated monitoring scripts.

piptotal is cross‑platform, functioning on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is written in pure Python 3.6 and newer. It relies on the standard pip internals and the pkg_resources module for package discovery, making it easy to maintain and extend. As of its latest release, piptotal is actively maintained in a public GitHub repository and is licensed under the MIT License.