a little function that checks whether a given module version is availble on pypi servers

pypi_module_version_is_available.py

# usage:
# pypi_module_version_is_available("Pillow", "5.4.0")

import subprocess
def pypi_module_version_is_available(module, version):
    "Check whether module==version is available on pypi"
    # returns True/False (or None if failed to execute the check)

    # using a hack that when passing "module==" w/ no version number to pip
    # it "fails" and returns all the available versions in stderr
    try:
        cmd = f"pip install {module}=="
        result = subprocess.run(cmd.split(), shell=False, check=False,
                                stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")
        return None
    else:
        if result.returncode == 1 and result.stderr:
            output = result.stderr.decode('utf-8')
            return True if version in output else False
        else:
            print(f"Some error in {cmd}")
            return None