Basket does not work anymore. It will not be fixed, because it is not supported anymore. You should switch to pip. pip is standard and comes with a lot more features and does not have many of the limitations of Basket.

• Basket uses the XML-RPC API from PyPI, which is (or will soon be) deprecated. Actually, some of the functions that Basket uses are not implemented anymore by the API. In other words, Basket does not work anymore.
• Basket does not support "version qualifiers" like Django>=4.0. It just downloads the most recent version, which may not be compatible with other dependencies. Also, by ignoring == qualifiers, Basket is incapable of setting up a reproducible environment. pip being the de-facto package install for Python, it has finer dependency version control.
• Basket only downloads source distributions. pip download wheels if available.
• Basket only downloads from PyPI and cannot download packages that are hosted elsewhere. pip can.
• Basket downloads all optional requirements. This was a feature, but that's not necessarily what you want. pip does what you tell it to do.

Migration guide from Basket to Pip

Important: if you're still using Python 2, be sure to use the latest version of pip that is compatible with Python 2, which seems to be version 20.3.4.

The following instructions are for Linux but commands are similar on Windows.

Before anything, you must create a new directory that will contain packages:

$ export PACKAGE_DIRECTORY=/home/you/packages
$ mkdir $PACKAGE_DIRECTORY

How to download packages:

$ pip download --dest $PACKAGE_DIRECTORY Django

How to install packages:

$ pip install --no-index --find-links=$PACKAGE_DIRECTORY Django

Legacy description

Basket is a small command-line utility that downloads Python packages from a (real) PyPI server and store them in a single place so that they can be found by easy_install or pip when offline.

I often work offline (typically in the train). It is not unusal then to have to create a virtual environment and fill it with the Python packages I need. Without an Internet connection, I could copy Python packages from an environment to another, but this is a bit cumbersome. I need a local PyPI repository. Basket allows me to build and maintain such a repository.

Basket is not a PyPI mirror. It is not a server: you cannot register or upload packages. It does not install Python packages in a Python installation or a virtual environment.

For further details, see the documentation at http://packages.python.org/Basket (or in the docs/ folder in the source).