How to install latest versions of packages on Google Colab (exists on PyPI, but missing on Colab index)?

Question

I need to perform some preprocessing that depends on the latest versions of certain PyPI packages. For example: scipy version 1.8.0. This package version has been released on PyPI on February 5th 2022.

I'm trying to pip install this package on Google Colab via:

# Specifying the index explicitly to ensure we're using PyPI directly.
!pip install -i https://pypi.python.org/simple scipy==1.8.0

Unfortunately this errors with:

Looking in indexes: https://pypi.python.org/simple
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement scipy==1.8.0 (from versions: 0.8.0, 0.9.0, 0.10.0, 0.10.1, 0.11.0, 0.12.0, 0.12.1, 0.13.0, 0.13.1, 0.13.2, 0.13.3, 0.14.0, 0.14.1, 0.15.0, 0.15.1, 0.16.0, 0.16.1, 0.17.0, 0.17.1, 0.18.0, 0.18.1, 0.19.0, 0.19.1, 1.0.0b1, 1.0.0rc1, 1.0.0rc2, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.1.0rc1, 1.1.0, 1.2.0rc1, 1.2.0rc2, 1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, 1.3.0rc1, 1.3.0rc2, 1.3.0, 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3, 1.4.0rc1, 1.4.0rc2, 1.4.0, 1.4.1, 1.5.0rc1, 1.5.0rc2, 1.5.0, 1.5.1, 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 1.5.4, 1.6.0rc1, 1.6.0rc2, 1.6.0, 1.6.1, 1.6.2, 1.6.3, 1.7.0rc1, 1.7.0rc2, 1.7.0, 1.7.1, 1.7.2, 1.7.3)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for scipy==1.8.0

Even though scipy 1.8.0 clearly is on the https://pypi.python.org/simple index, I'm not seeing it Colab, and the latest available version is several months old.

Is there a way to pip install up-to-date package versions on Colab?

Answer 1

If you look at the files here

https://pypi.org/project/scipy/1.8.0/#files

You'll see they are only available for Python 3.8 and above.

So You'll either need to upgrade Python to 3.8 or compile scipy 1.8.0 from source.