π¬ Question: When installing packages with pip, does it matter if the letters are capitalized (uppercase/lowercase), i.e., is PIP case sensitive?
Answer
PyPI and PIP are not case-sensitive. Instead, Python package names are case-insensitive. For example, it doesn’t matter whether you run pip install Pandas
, pip install PANDAS
, or pip install pandas
.

However, Python package names are case sensitive when used within the Python code itself, e.g., import PANDAS
and import Pandas
will raise a ModuleNotFoundError
whereas import pandas
will work just fine.
Here’s this example:
>>> import PANDAS Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module> import PANDAS ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PANDAS' >>> import Pandas Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#11>", line 1, in <module> import Pandas ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'Pandas' >>> import pandas
Sources
The case insensitivity is outlined in multiple official Python sources (PEP) such as here:
π “PyPI places strict restrictions on names – they must match a case insensitive regex or they wonβt be accepted.”
And here:
π “All comparisons of distribution names MUST be case insensitive, and MUST consider hyphens and underscores to be equivalent.”
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