Is setuptools healthy, maintained, and safe?
Maintained, but watch it — setuptools has real signals (drift, thin maintenance, or advisories) worth tracking.
The verdict
On the OSPulse health scale, setuptools lands at 55/100 — medium risk, computed deterministically from live PyPI release history, and the OSV vulnerability database. Maintained, but watch it — setuptools has real signals (drift, thin maintenance, or advisories) worth tracking.
Its most recent release shipped on 4 July 2026 — 24 days ago — so development is clearly active. Across 613 releases the cadence has been steady, which is a good sign of an ongoing maintenance rhythm. PyPI doesn't expose a reliable maintainer count, so bus-factor isn't scored here — treat maintenance depth as unknown rather than assumed.
OSV lists 10 known advisories for setuptools, including 4 high. Review whether your version is in the affected range and whether a fixed release is available before depending on it. Each advisory is listed with its OSV/GHSA identifier below.
setuptools is usable but carries real signals — pin versions, watch for new advisories, and keep a fallback in mind. This is a one-time snapshot of a single package — real projects depend on dozens or hundreds of packages, and any one of them can drift or be compromised between releases. Run your own requirements.txt through the free health check, or have OSPulse monitor your whole dependency tree continuously.
Evidence trail — deterministic, auditable
Known vulnerabilities (10)
Setuptools vulnerable to Man-in-the-middle attacks
setuptools has a path traversal vulnerability in PackageIndex.download that leads to Arbitrary File Write
setuptools vulnerable to Command Injection via package URL
setuptools: MANIFEST.in exclusion bypass in sdist via Unicode normalization collision (NFC/NFD) on macOS APFS/HFS+
pypa/setuptools vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)
easy_install in setuptools before 0.7 uses HTTP to retrieve packages from the PyPI repository, and does not perform integrity checks on package contents, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to ex
Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) setuptools before 65.5.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via HTML in a crafted package or custom PackageIndex page. There is a Regular Expression
setuptools is a package that allows users to download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages. A path traversal vulnerability in `PackageIndex` is present in setuptools prior to versio
setuptools vulnerable to Command Injection via package URL
setuptools is a package that allows users to download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages. Prior to 83.0.0, FileList applied MANIFEST.in exclude, global-exclude, recursive-exclude,
Key facts
- Latest version
- v83.0.0
- Last release
- 4 July 2026 (24 days ago)
- Total releases
- 613
- First release
- 12 May 2006
- Package age
- 20.2 years
- Maintainers
- not exposed by PyPI
- Known advisories
- 10
- Confidence
- High
Frequently asked
Is setuptools still maintained?
Yes — setuptools released as recently as 4 July 2026 (24 days ago), so it is actively maintained.
Does setuptools have known security vulnerabilities?
Yes — OSV lists 10 advisories for setuptools. See the advisory list on this page for the OSV/GHSA identifiers.
Is setuptools safe to use?
Maintained, but watch it — setuptools has real signals (drift, thin maintenance, or advisories) worth tracking. OSPulse rates it 55/100 (medium risk) based on release recency, cadence and known vulnerabilities.
Other PyPI packages we've checked
setuptools is one package. What about the other hundreds in your tree?
Paste your own requirements.txt into the free health check for an instant snapshot — or let OSPulse monitor your whole dependency tree continuously, before your CVE scanner wakes up.
Data from the PyPI registry & OSV.dev · snapshot generated 2026-07-28 · scores are deterministic and recomputed on each refresh.