Cannot upgrade pip in Ubuntu VM on OS X Sierra

Question

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a VM created by VirtualBox on OS X Sierra. After I installed some packages using pip, I got a prompt:

You are using pip version 8.1.1, however version 9.0.1 is available. You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command

Since I cannot copy from the VM and paste here, I have included am image of what happens when I run pip install --upgrade pip

How can I upgrade pip to the latest version, 9.0.1?

Answer 1

You should run the pip command using sudo:

sudo pip install --upgrade pip

However I suggest you to install python packages using --user switch it's more safe in my opinion.

pip install --upgrade pip --user

After updating you can remove old version installed by apt:

sudo apt remove python-pip

or if it's for python3:

sudo apt remove python3-pip 

At the end use --version to check pip version:

pip --version