Credentials in pip.conf for private PyPI

You could store credentials for Pip to use in ~/.netrc like this:

machine pypi.example.com    login johndoe    password changeme

Pip will use these credentials when accessing https://pypi.example.com but won't log them. You must specify the index server separately (such as in pip.conf as in the question).

Note that ~/.netrc must be owned by the user pip executes as. It must not be readable by any other user, either. An invalid file is silently ignored. You can ensure the permissions are correct like this:

chown $USER ~/.netrcchmod 0600 ~/.netrc

This permissions check doesn't apply before Python 3.4, but it's a good idea in any case.

Internally Pip uses requests when making HTTP requests. requests uses the standard library netrc module to read the file, so the character set is limited to an ASCII subset.

How about storing the Username/Password as environment variables,

export username=usernameexport password=password

and referring to them in the pip.conf like so:

[global]index = https://$username:$password@pypi.example.com/pypiindex-url = https://$username:$password@pypi.example.com/simplecert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

I use Gitlab CI's secret variables for storing credentials. Check for an equivalent in your CI tool.

Given issue 4789 is still open, you can utilize the following approach in your requirements.txt:

--extra-index-url=https://${PYPI_USERNAME}:${PYPI_PASSWORD}@my.privatepypi.comprivate-package==1.2.3...

If you try to run pip install requirements.txt with those environment variables set, you will find that pip still asks for credentials. This is because pip does not interpolate the expression ${PYPI_USERNAME} as one would expect, but rather url encodes it. Your username and password in this example is expressed as https://%24%7BPYPI_USERNAME%7D:%24%7BPYPI_PASSWORD%7D@my.privatepypi.com

The work around here, and I admit there should be a better approach, but we can run pip as a script:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

From man:

 -m module-name    Searches sys.path for the named module and runs the corresponding .py file as a script.