Installing optional dependencies for Python libraries in zsh

super short post alert

If you’re using zsh as your shell and trying to install an optional dependency of a Python library, you’ll end up with a no matches found error, for example:

> pip install gql[all]     

zsh: no matches found: gql[all]

This has to do with the way zsh handles square brackets. Instead you can use single quotes to escape the library name, like this:

pip install 'gql[all]'

That’s it! This has been posted in various other online forums but I wanted a spot to document it for myself since I was caught rather off-guard by the error message.