How to Install beautifulsoup4 in Python
Screen-scraping library
pip install beautifulsoup4
What is beautifulsoup4?
Screen-scraping library
Beautiful Soup is a library that makes it easy to scrape information from web pages. It sits atop an HTML or XML parser, providing Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree.
To go beyond the basics, comprehensive documentation is available.
Homepage Documentation Discussion group Development Bug tracker Complete changelog
Quick Start
Minimal example to get started with beautifulsoup4:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = requests.get("https://example.com").text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
title = soup.find("title").text
links = [a["href"] for a in soup.find_all("a", href=True)]
print(title, links)
Installation
pip (standard)
pip install beautifulsoup4
Virtual environment (recommended)
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip3
pip3 install beautifulsoup4
conda
conda install -c conda-forge beautifulsoup4
Poetry
poetry add beautifulsoup4
Dependencies
Installing beautifulsoup4 will also install these packages:
Verify the Installation
After installing, confirm the package is available:
python -c "import bs4; print(bs4.__version__)"
If this prints a version number, installation succeeded. If you see a ModuleNotFoundError, see the errors section below.
Installation Errors
Common errors when installing beautifulsoup4 with pip.
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'bs4'
Cause: The package is not installed in the current Python environment.
Fix: Run pip install beautifulsoup4. If using a virtual environment, ensure it is activated first.
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'bs4' (installed but still failing)
Cause: pip installed the package into a different Python than the one running your script.
Fix: Use python -m pip install beautifulsoup4 to install into the interpreter you are running.
ImportError: cannot import name 'X' from 'bs4'
Cause: The function or class does not exist in the installed version.
Fix: Check the version with pip show beautifulsoup4 and upgrade with pip install --upgrade beautifulsoup4.
pip: command not found
Cause: pip is not in PATH or Python was not added to PATH during installation.
Fix: Try python -m pip install beautifulsoup4. On macOS/Linux try pip3.
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied
Cause: No write access to the system Python package directory.
Fix: Use a virtual environment, or add --user: pip install --user beautifulsoup4
SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED
Cause: pip cannot verify PyPI's SSL certificate — common behind corporate proxies.
Fix: Try: pip install --trusted-host pypi.org --trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org beautifulsoup4
Recent Releases
| Version | Released |
|---|---|
4.14.3 latest |
2025-11-30 |
4.14.1 |
2025-09-29 |
4.14.2 |
2025-09-29 |
4.14.0 |
2025-09-27 |
4.13.5 |
2025-08-24 |
Manage beautifulsoup4
Upgrade to latest version
pip install --upgrade beautifulsoup4
Install a specific version
pip install beautifulsoup4==4.14.3
Uninstall
pip uninstall beautifulsoup4
Check what is installed
pip show beautifulsoup4