What is Virtualenv?
A Virtual Environment, put simply, is an isolated working copy of Python which allows you to work on a specific project without worry of affecting other projects It enables multiple side-by-side installations of Python, one for each project. It doesn’t actually install separate copies of Python, but it does provide a clever way to keep different project environments isolated.
Verify if Virtualenv is installed
There is a chance that virtualenv is already installed on your system. Run the following command in your terminal
virtualenv --version
If you see a version number (in my case 1.6.1), it's already installed. >>1.6.1
Install Virtualenv
There are a number of ways to install virtualenv on your system.
$ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv $ sudo easy_install virtualenv $ sudo pip install virtualenv
Setup and Use Virtualenv
Once you have virtualenv installed, just fire up a shell and create your own environment.
First create a directory for your new shiny isolated environment
mkdir ~/virtualenvironment
To create a folder for your new app that includes a clean copy of Python, simply run:
virtualenv ~/virtualenvironment/my_new_app
(add --no-site-packages if you want to isolate your environment from the main site packages directory) To begin working with your project, you have to cd into your directory (project) and activate the virtual environment.
cd ~/virtualenvironment/my_new_app/bin
Lastly, activate your environment:
source activate
Notice how the prompt of your shell changed to show the active environment. That is how you can see that you're in your new environment. Any packages you install now using pip or easy_install get installed into my_new_app/lib/python2.7/site-packages. To exit your virtualenv just type “deactivate”.
What did Virtualenv do?
Packages installed here will not affect the global Python installation. Virtualenv does not create every file needed to get a whole new python environment It uses links to global environment files instead in order to save disk space end speed up your virtualenv. Therefore, there must already have an active python environment installed on your system.
Install a package in your Virtualenv
If you look at the bin directory in your virtualenv, you’ll see easy_install which has been modified to put eggs and packages in the virtualenv’s site-packages directory. To install an app in your Virtualenv:
pip install flask
You don't have to use sudo since the files will all be installed in the virtualenv /lib/python2.7/site-packages directory which was created as your own user account
That's it, I hope that you learned something from this post
For further reading, please see: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/installation/#virtualenv http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv Getting-started-with-virtualenv-isolated-python-environments/
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