The Python Package Index, or PyPI, which can be found at https://pypi.python.org, is the official software repository for third-party applications in the Python programming language. Python developers want it to be a comprehensive catalog of all Python packages written in open source code.

To download packages from the PyPI repository, you can use several tools, but in this section, we will explain how to use the pip command to do so. pip is the official package installer that comes already installed when you install Python on your local machine.

You can find all of the Python networking libraries in the Python PyPI repository, such as requests (https://pypi.org/project/requests) and urllib (https://pypi.org/project/urllib3).

Installing a package using pip is very simple—just execute pip install <package_name>; for example, pip install requests. We can also install pip using the package manager of a Linux distribution. For example, in a Debian or Ubuntu distribution, we can use the apt-get command:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip