Optimizing Python Package Update Workflow

I love updating dependencies and reading through the release notes. It’s just a great feeling finding out about new features!

So, ever since I started coding in Python, I’ve adored going through each dependency in the requirements.txt, firing up pypi and walking through everything. Over the years, this habit carried over to Pipfile and nowadays pyproject.toml.

Lately, IDEs also tend to automatically highlight where a new version is available.

Sadly, they rarely show you more than that. So, I was still stuck with this clunky workflow: open pypi, copy the package name from my file into the search, click on the correct package, check the version, and click on the changelog (if there is one directly linked, otherwise I’ll fire up the github repo in hopes of finding one there).

Today, thanks to the power of Claude Sonnet and the pypi JSON API, I’ve optimized that workflow.

Introducing the python package version checker

It’s a neat little web component, that works completely client side in your browser. It fetches the latest version and tries to find a changelog, or a repository url, in the package metadata.

Writing web components is really refreshing. No framework cruft. This one is completely generated by Sonnet, so it’s probably not as clean as it could be. I still like the mindset and style though.

Something like a bulk mode would be pretty neat to have in the future as well. Maybe even support parsing the pyproject file directly, now that the dependency specifier syntax seems to have standardized.