pylibyear

What it is and what it does

Pylibyear is a CLI tool that audits your project's dependency freshness by comparing each installed package version against its latest available release on PyPI, then sums the time gaps into a single metric called "libyears." It reads from requirements.txt or pyproject.toml files and outputs a table showing each dependency's current version, latest version, and how many libyears behind it is.

The tool is designed around the principle that dependency age is a simple, explainable proxy for technical debt. A project with dependencies averaging one year old has accumulated one libyear of staleness; a project with ten dependencies each two years old accumulates twenty libyears. The package depends on httpx for PyPI queries, packaging for version parsing, prettytable for formatted output, python-dateutil for time calculations, and typer for CLI scaffolding.

Use it for:

• Audit a legacy project's dependency stack to quantify technical debt before planning upgrades.
• Monitor dependency freshness in CI/CD pipelines and flag projects exceeding a staleness threshold.
• Generate a single metric for stakeholder reports on codebase maintenance health.
• Compare dependency age across multiple projects to prioritize which codebases need attention first.
• Identify which specific packages are dragging down your freshness score before starting an upgrade sprint.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Measures how outdated your project's dependencies are by calculating the total time gap between your installed versions and their latest releases, expressed as a single "libyear" number.

Yes, if you need a quick, explainable measure of dependency age for auditing or reporting. The tool is lightweight, actively maintained, and solves a specific problem well. Not necessary if you already use a more comprehensive dependency scanner (e.g., one that also checks for security vulnerabilities or license compliance).

Install

pylibyear on PyPI

pip install pylibyear

uv add pylibyear

poetry add pylibyear

Installing pylibyear

Before you install

Low friction: pure Python wheel with six straightforward runtime dependencies (httpx, packaging, prettytable, python-dateutil, typer, typing-extensions). Requires Python 3.11 or later. Active maintenance with a recent release.

License in practice

MIT License permits free use, modification, and distribution with minimal restrictions—suitable for most commercial and open-source projects.

Quickstart

pip install pylibyear
libyear text requirements.txt

Requires Python 3.11 or later. Needs a requirements.txt or pyproject.toml file to analyze.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package correctly handles all dependency formats (editable installs, git URLs, environment markers).
• Performance characteristics when analyzing very large dependency trees.
• How it handles packages with irregular or missing version history in PyPI.

Package facts

Evidence: pylibyear-0.5.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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